Japan's Five-Year AI Education Window — Learning in the Age of AI (T4IS 2026 Panel)

The line that got the longest pause from the Tech for Impact Summit 2026 audience came from Satoshi Hirose, Dean of GLOBIS University’s Graduate School of Management, halfway through the Learning in the Age of AI panel.

“Gradually, they are students who are, in a lack of a better word, like, prisoned by, hostage by AI.”

He was describing what he sees in his global English MBA classrooms when he asks a fragmented question and a student raises their hand thirty seconds later with a polished answer. He follows up: how did you come to that idea? Most of the time, he said, the student tells him openly: that’s AI’s answer. The thinking step was skipped. The student had simply read what ChatGPT or Gemini said and re-spoken it.

The Main Stage panel was moderated by Harry Dempsey, the Financial Times’ Tokyo Correspondent, who mentioned he is a new father with a six-month-old daughter. The three panelists work on the AI shift from different seats: a venture fund, a business school, and an enterprise software company. They agreed on more than they disagreed on, and where they disagreed it was about what to do next.

Who Was on Stage

Yumiko Murakami (村上由美子) is General Partner at MPower Partners Fund — Japan’s first ESG-focused global venture capital fund, which she co-founded in 2021 with Kathy Matsui and Miwa Seki. Before MPower, she spent seven years as Head of the OECD Tokyo Centre, leading economic policy work with Japanese government entities, after a near-twenty-year career at Goldman Sachs across New York, London, and Tokyo. She has served on the Prime Minister’s advisory boards under both the Kishida and Ishiba administrations, including on AI policy.

Satoshi Hirose (廣瀬聡) is Dean of GLOBIS University’s Graduate School of Management and a Managing Director at GLOBIS Corporation. GLOBIS holds roughly 40% market share of the Japanese MBA market and runs the largest venture capital arm in Japan, with approximately ¥200 billion (~$1.3 billion) under management. Hirose’s career spans derivatives trading at AIG, management consulting at A.T. Kearney, and a turnaround leadership role through the 2008 financial crisis.

Maiko Kojima (児島真衣子) is the founder and CEO of Crafter, an enterprise AI SaaS acquired by Monex Group in 2022. Crafter’s “Crew” platform — an AI search layer that sits on top of corporate knowledge bases — is deployed at 300+ enterprises. Her 2025 book, Textbook of Generative AI for Business (Gakken), is built on conversations with more than 1,000 corporate AI leaders. She also chairs the Women AI Initiative Japan and serves on the Generative AI Utilization and Promotion Association (GUGA) council that informs national AI policy.

Harry Dempsey of the Financial Times moderated.

The Five-Year Window That Japan Cannot Waste

Murakami opened. Japan’s AI policy direction was set by the government’s announcement last May — a “light-touch, innovation-first” stance, in deliberate contrast to the EU’s regulation-heavy approach — and reinforced by the Ministry of Education’s first basic AI policy, released last December.

Both moves, she said, come from the same place: Japan has no choice.

“Japan is facing the reality and really embracing the reality that we don’t have people. We are rapidly shrinking. They are actually trying to embrace AI in the classroom in a very constructive manner. They’re starting with elementary school, which I think is great. That’s what’s needed because we don’t have a lot of people. So you have to start with the younger generation.”

Then she put a number on the time horizon:

“Given the very limited time and given the advantage that they have, they’re really trying to move very quickly. It could be just five years. It could be just ten years. It could be two years, depending on how quickly these technologies develop.”

Japan’s labor market is rigid and short of people, so the AI-driven layoffs now hitting entry-level work in the United States have not started here.

“If you look at the U.S. right now, both startups and established companies, they are laying off huge, huge number of entry-level jobs. That’s not happening in Japan. That’s not happening at all in Japan.”

A rigid labor market, which the business press has spent thirty years listing among Japan’s weaknesses, is for now buying companies time to retrain people.

Numeracy and Literacy World-Class. Critical Thinking, Not Yet.

Murakami, citing the OECD PISA data she worked with for seven years, argued that Japan’s basic educational results are among the best in the world. Japanese 15-year-olds rank at the top of international assessments in numeracy and literacy. The basic infrastructure has also been quietly built: every public school student has had a personal device since 2020 or 2021.

What Japan has not built, she said, is the ability to handle questions the textbook does not answer.

“In the era of AI adaptation, that’s the ability — that’s the number one priority in terms of where education needs to focus on. Critical thinking. Can you think outside the box? There are many questions in the real world where there are no obvious right answers. And sometimes there is no answer. The Japanese education so far has been quite behind when it comes to developing this critical thinking ability among students.”

A country that already has the math, the reading, the classroom devices and light-touch regulation does not start from zero. It has to add critical thinking on top, and by her estimate it has roughly five years to do it.

“There’s an entrance exam to universities in Japan. You choose one of the four options because one of them is always the right answer. And we all know in real life, sometimes there’s no one answer. Sometimes there are no answers.”

The “Be the Same” Reflex GLOBIS Is Trying to Reverse

Hirose went to elementary school in London and returned to Japan in his teens.

“In UK, I was always asked, Satoshi, always be unique. You need to be different with others. When I returned back in Japan, always: why are you so different with others? You need to be the same. This is the only thing I believe that we can do better in terms of Japanese education.”

GLOBIS does not teach what AI can already do. Its curriculum concentrates on two things Hirose believes AI cannot yet do: setting the goal (zero-to-one), and making the final decision.

The first lever is kokorozashi (志) — a Japanese word he glossed for the audience as “sense of mission.” Every GLOBIS student delivers a five-minute final presentation on what their kokorozashi is — what they want to use their life for. “This is something that I believe AI cannot still give you the right answer at this moment. This is what you have to think about.”

The second is the case-method discipline. “Each of the class faculties does not ask which is the right answer at all. What is your right answer? AI can give you great options, but it is ultimately you to make the final judgment.”

The third is what GLOBIS has trademarked as Technovate: every class, including finance and accounting, covers how AI and big data change the discipline. All faculty are 100% practitioners rather than academics. Hirose’s reasoning is that students need teachers who have made hard decisions.

“60% Have Adopted It. Almost Nobody Uses It.”

Kojima brought the corporate numbers. Two years ago, she said, only about 20% of Japanese companies — including SMBs — had adopted AI in their business. NTT Docomo’s most recent enterprise survey, released two months ago, put the figure at 50–60%.

“They adopted AI, but not so many people, not so many employees are using their own AI. If they use it, it’s almost like very limited use cases. They only use it for surveys. They only use it for brainstorming. Those use cases are very good. But it has to be adopted on their own workforce, like the AI agent.”

When Crafter surveys employees post-rollout on what they need next, the answer is identical across companies: training and reskilling. The training that works, Kojima argued, is critical-thinking and source-evaluation training rather than productivity training, the same gap Murakami had named.

She pointed at Finland’s media-literacy curriculum as the model: teachers issue 18- to 20-item checklists, show students a video of a celebrity or public figure, and run a structured class debate on whether the video is real or AI-generated and, if fake, what its purpose is. Crafter is now adapting this approach for corporate training, aimed at senior employees who evaluate AI-generated content as part of their job and have never been taught to question a synthetic source, as much as at new hires.

“You have to be critical to understand what’s the, not only human, but also AI-generated content has become. You have to understand the objective of the creators.”

The Entry-Level-Job Question, From Three Sides

Dempsey closed on the entry-level question: if AI takes over the junior work where new hires used to learn judgment, who trains the next generation of decision-makers?

The three panelists gave three different answers.

“They have more, they have been using AI very AI-native. If they see something inconvenient, they feel like, let’s put it in AI. It does the work better than you. The important thing the decision-maker has to do is embrace the usage of AI. Don’t be the person who stops the new type of usage.” The bottleneck, in her telling, is senior staff with deep domain skill and no AI fluency.

Murakami answered as an investor. She is backing what she calls the AI-utilization layer because Japan’s labor structure gives those companies runway. “It gives companies a little bit of a breathing space. It gives people the time to think about what they should do — not to replace people, but to retrain, reskill, and upskill.”

Hirose returned to the warning that opened this recap. Among his older part-time and online MBA students — average age 35 — he sees AI used as an idea-enhancer. Among the younger trial-class cohorts he teaches abroad, he increasingly sees “people who are accustomed or hostage in AI, and do not think by their own words.” If that pattern hardens, he said, “it will stop the thinking process. And this is something that we need to be very, very careful.”

What This Connects to in T4IS2027

Three topics from this panel carry into the next summit.

AI in shrinking economies. Japan is ahead of every other developed economy on the demographic curve by 10–20 years, and other countries will copy or reject the education and policy choices it makes now.

The corporate deployment gap. Why 60% adoption turns into very little daily use, and what changes that. This is Kojima’s field.

What to educate people for when an answer costs nothing. Hirose’s kokorozashi framing, start with what your life is for and use AI to execute, will be back on stage in 2027.

Organizations working on any of these, whether running a corporate reskilling program, building an education-tech company, advising on AI policy or investing in the AI-utilization layer, are the ones the next summit is being built for. The membership and application page is at tech4impactsummit.com/membership.