Commentary: Japan’s an AI laggard, but that could be its edge

“A REAL SIGNAL TO THE REST OF THE WORLD”

In a country long admired for hardware but less so for software, engineers are using AI to narrow the gap. The Microsoft report found that developers in Japan uploaded 129 per cent more code changes to GitHub than a year earlier, compared with the global average of 78 per cent – a signal that the technology is already changing how coders work.

The world’s tech companies have noticed. There’s a new wave of entrepreneurship taking place in Japan and “we want to be part of the story,” Dmitry Shevelenko, the chief business officer at San Francisco-based Perplexity AI, told me at a recent event in Tokyo. He’s far from alone as the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and others are opening offices. 

Yet the country remains relatively insulated, and there’s still hesitation about going all-in with foreign institutions. Companies that want to be part of Japan’s AI transformation should act like long-term stakeholders, hiring local staff and offering serious partnerships. 

This could also mean fostering deeper collaborations with universities and research communities. Scientists remain one of the few groups in Japan that still command high public trust, according to an Edelman survey. AI firms that want credibility should borrow less from Silicon Valley’s hype machine and more from Japan’s institutional ecosystem.

Still, as Shevelenko puts it: “If you’re successful here, it’s a real signal to the rest of the world that you’ve built something of incredible quality.” He’s correct that this discernment is an edge.