As Sam Altman, the boss of Openai, the maker of Chatgpt, put it last year while visiting Tokyo, the site of his firm’s first office in Asia: “There’s a long history of humans and machines working together here to embrace automation technology.”
Masayoshi Son, the boss of SoftBank and Japan’s most famous tech investor, has been warning for years that his home country has been behind the curve. Earlier this month he chastised Japanese firms for focusing on small-scale systems, rather than building ambitious AI giants.
Using AI on an individual basis is easy, but “doing something deeper—transforming systems or how companies work—that’s a different story”, says Matsuo Yutaka, who chairs the government’s AI council.
The difficulty of transforming systems with AI — as opposed to using it individually — suggests that AI is not a self-contained solution but an element of craft. Integrating it meaningfully requires the same organizational discipline and design thinking as any other tool.
