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Available in Tokyo and across JapanJapan is routinely described as behind on AI. Its own national survey of 22,000 employees found employer AI use at 12.9 per cent, which is a fraction of what the discourse implies and not far off what every other measured country reports.
A feel for the room before you put me in front of yours.
The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training surveyed 22,000 employees, stratified on the 2020 Census, with the OECD involved in the design. It found 12.9 per cent reporting any AI use by their employer and 8.4 per cent using it themselves.
That is a serious instrument, not a panel poll, and it is worth setting beside the others. Singapore measured firm adoption at 28.5 per cent. Korea measured actual firm adoption at 2.7 per cent. Hong Kong does not measure it. Read together, the picture is not a Japanese lag so much as a general gap between how much AI is discussed and how much of it is in use.
For a Tokyo board the useful consequence is time. Adoption is early enough that the decisions about which judgements stay human can still be made in advance, rather than reconstructed afterwards from what happened to be automated first. The full account is at AI and work in Japan.
AI rarely takes a whole job. It takes the first draft, the initial analysis, the routine review. Those were also the tasks through which people built the judgement that made them senior. The work still ships, the output often improves, and nothing triggers an alarm.
Low adoption does not protect the apprenticeship. It only means the substitution has not happened yet. Where it has been measured, the effect concentrates on exactly the people who were meant to be learning: France found employment of under-thirties in IT services down 7.4 per cent year on year, and Korea found the impact of AI adoption falling on younger, tertiary-educated workers. Neither country announced a plan to do that. It was the residue of a thousand local decisions.
The question for a leadership team is therefore about mode rather than adoption. Is the organisation drifting into AI through a thousand small reasonable decisions nobody quite made, or designing it by deciding in advance where human judgement has to remain? Drift asks nothing of you. That is what makes it the default.
Boards, executive committees, global headquarters, and corporate and association conferences in Tokyo and across Japan. Delivery is in English only. Simultaneous interpretation is arranged by the host where required, and the session is structured to work with it. Rahim travels from London, and where travel is not practical the same session is delivered online. He can travel to the region or deliver virtually across all time zones.
Three keynotes, all versions of one argument. Drift vs Design is the signature talk for boards and executive teams. We Are Superheroes covers the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. WTH, What the Human is a live judgement test for boards, run in the room, December to March only. Full descriptions are at keynotes.
A Japanese-language summary of this argument is at the Japanese page, which is published in Japanese because the reader reads Japanese, not because the keynote is delivered in it.
Rahim Hirji speaks in Tokyo in English on AI, work and human judgement. He is the author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026) and founded EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College. His Japan material comes from the JILPT national employee survey rather than from vendor research. Simultaneous interpretation is arranged by the host where required.
The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training surveyed 22,000 employees, stratified on the 2020 Census with the OECD involved in the design, and found 12.9 per cent reporting any AI use by their employer and 8.4 per cent using it themselves. That is lower than the discourse implies, and not far from what other measured countries report.
The comparison is less clear-cut than usually stated. Japan's 12.9 per cent employer use sits between Korea's 2.7 per cent measured firm adoption and Singapore's 28.5 per cent, and Hong Kong does not measure AI at all. The consistent finding across countries is that adoption is well below what the discussion implies.
Written by Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. The research is published openly with every source graded. Found an error? Tell me and it is corrected on the page.
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Part of speaking across Asia. See also Seoul and Singapore.
