Tokyo AI (TAI)

Happy 1st birthday to us!

Last week we had our 7th AI Salon Tokyo session, with startups graduating out of the Blitzscaling Academy, and some guests from Startup Island TAIWAN! We started with two speakers: 1) Marat Karpeko (Co-founder of the gaming unicorn Wargaming.net, as well as an investor in AI startups), gave us his perspective on the current AI startup landscape. 2) Jeremiah Owyang (GP at Blitzscaling Ventures) showed us his research on the AI agent landscape and talked about some of their recent portfolio companies. We then had 6 startups from the Blitzscaling Academy: 1) Smart Agri Labs - AI to improve agriculture yields. 2) Newell Road - AI analyst for market and competitive analysis. 3) Veritus - AI copilot for search, review, and analysis in complex research workflows. 4) CREATANT, Inc - AI-enabled digital world for collaboration and productivity. 5) AironWorks - AI against social engineering attacks. 6) VoicePing - on-device, offline, real-time translations. And we closed with our friends from Taiwan: 7) MoBagel - an AI Builder platform. 8) VMFi Inc - simultaneous interpretation of conferences and meetings. 9) Sightour - on-prem LLMs for document digitization and chatbots. Thanks again for coming, and see you at our next AI Salon Tokyo session: 20 Nov - First "reverse pitch", targeting startups that want to connect with large enterprise customers - https://lu.ma/53ghvsje 11 Dec - Last AI Salon Tokyo of 2024 - https://lu.ma/5turwsg8 Thanks as usual to our supporters from JETRO - Japan External Trade Organization (Yusuke Kaga, Ryoma Kanie, Momoka Ueda) and DEEPCORE (Hiroshi Nemoto)!

This crazy Tokyo AI week is almost done, but we don't stop, and with Sana T. and our teams at Tokyo AI (TAI) and AI Salon Tokyo (AIST) have been planning this new "Enterprise x Startup" reverse pitch series for a while. We all know the need for relationship and credibility building before your startup can manage to work with a large corporation. We'd like to make it easier to experiment with these large enterprise companies, so for this first edition, we've invited Panasonic and Syngenta to learn about their AI-related challenges. Register: https://lu.ma/53ghvsje Topic 1 - AgriTech (Syngenta) Speaker: Yuichi Yanagida - Head of Strategy and Business Development Challenge Statements 1. Transforming rice paddies into smart, sustainable ecosystems. 2. Championing Risocare and water-saving direct seeding techniques (Think: precision agriculture meets centuries-old wisdom). 3. Seeking AI Wizards and agri-tech Ninjas to join our rice revolution! Yuichi and the team are always on the lookout for brilliant minds to hack the future of agriculture. Topic 2 - AI Applications (Panasonic) Speaker: 築澤宗太郎 (Sotaro Tsukizawa) - Associate General Manager, DX & CPS Division, Technology Sector Challenge Statements 1. Quality assurance for AI-powered services: GenAI is prone to mistakes and hallucinations, which causes considerable disadvantages to users, and is unacceptable to the majority of customers. How do we address such disadvantages, and how do we ensure the quality of AI model output? 2. Vendor neutrality: AI is rapidly evolving, with no guarantee the currently best model will continue to fit our business tomorrow and in five years. Before starting an AI project, how do we need to take into account switching costs for various AI service providers? Topic 3 - Panel @ Enterprise x Startup Finally, the two guest corporations will join us for a panel to provide insights into how they work with startups. For this panel, Panasonic (築澤宗太郎) and Syngenta (Taiki Fukunaga) will be joined by Florian Geier, currently a Senior Director at the startup generator Antler, who spent years in FUJIFILM working on innovation and startup collaboration. With this panel, we want to start our series on the startup x enterprise collaboration, to make it easier to run early-stage POCs and shorten sales cycles for our startups. Register: https://lu.ma/53ghvsje

November 20 - AI Salon Tokyo, the Enterprise Reverse Pitch edition #01! We all struggle with those long enterprise sales cycles, so we started this series to get entrepreneurs from our Tokyo AI (TAI) community to start building their relationships with some of the largest global companies. The second of the two reverse pitches is by Panasonic (築澤宗太郎), a multinational electronics conglomerate. Tsukizawa-san will discuss two challenges with their AI application usage: 1) quality assurance for AI-powered services; and 2) AI vendor neutrality and switching costs. Organizer(s): Sana T. Sponsor(s): DEEPCORE and JETRO - Japan External Trade Organization Location: Akasaka Registration: https://lu.ma/53ghvsje

November 19 - TAI Applied ML and AI The fourth and last speaker tonight is Shoya Matsumori, who will talk about his product Jinbaflow, an automation tool to build workflows with natural language. Organizer: Michael Makarov Sponsor(s): Code Chrysalis and Pinecone Location: Roppongi Registration: https://lnkd.in/guZhS85A

November 19 - TAI Applied ML and AI The third speaker is Ewa Szyszka, with the talk title "Lights, Camera… AI! Introduction to Generative Filmmaking". With Ewa, we will discover the latest advancements in generative video AI and its real-world applications in filmmaking. Organizer: Michael Makarov Sponsor(s): Code Chrysalis and Pinecone Location: Roppongi Registration: https://lnkd.in/guZhS85A

November 20 - AI Salon Tokyo, the Enterprise Reverse Pitch edition #01! We all struggle with those long enterprise sales cycles, so we started this series to get entrepreneurs from our Tokyo AI (TAI) community to start building their relationships with some of the largest global companies. The first of the two reverse pitches is by Syngenta (Yuichi Yanagida), a global agri-tech company, founded in 2000 by the merger of the agrichemical businesses of Novartis and AstraZeneca. Syngenta's revenue last year was around $20bn, it's a major player you want to work with, and they have a very strong commitment to innovation. Whether you are in agri-tech, or other B2B niches, come connect with the guys from Syngenta! Organizer(s): Sana T. Sponsor(s): DEEPCORE and JETRO - Japan External Trade Organization Location: Akasaka Registration: https://lu.ma/53ghvsje

November 19 - TAI Applied ML and AI The second speaker is Ahmed Bahaaeldin Darwish, who will discuss "Multi-Agents and the Future". He will introduce the concept of Multi-Agents and explore their current applications and the evolving trends in this exciting field. Organizer: Michael Makarov Sponsor(s): Code Chrysalis and Pinecone Location: Roppongi Registration: https://lnkd.in/guZhS85A

November 19 - TAI Applied ML and AI The first speaker is Shoyu Ro, who will discuss "Building a Japanese-Compatible AI Search Engine: Architecture and RAG Integration." This talk will address the semantic search framework and the unique challenges of integrating RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) with Japanese language models. Organizer: Michael Makarov Sponsor(s): Code Chrysalis and Pinecone Location: Roppongi Registration: https://lnkd.in/guZhS85A

Hope to see lots of you in a couple hours!