From Silicon Valley to Cebu: Japanese tech leader on AI’s potential in the Philippines

Wazzup Pilipinas?!




Fujikura is leading Sansan’s expansion into the Philippines and in charge of hiring up to 100 staff at its new Cebu development center by next year



Starting his career at the Silicon Valley (California, USA) subsidiary of Japan’s Osaka Gas Company, Fujikura Shigemoto witnessed first-hand the exciting joint venture projects between Japanese and U.S. companies. He worked on developing cutting-edge technology and bringing it back to Japan, with colleagues who wanted to change the world. It also filled him with a vision of deeply changing the world through technology. He quit his California job and returned to Japan.There, he joined a young innovative startup called Sansan, which has since gone on to become one of Japan’s leading technology companies following a 2019 IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TYO:4443).

As Sansan’s 18th employee, Fujikura worked as an engineer/developer in infrastructure design and server architecture, before being asked to become a manager and then Chief Technology Officer. Today, he is in charge of directing all tech matters at Sansan and was the leader pushing for a global development center overseas as far back as 2019. Then COVID hit, and plans had to be postponed. Fast forward to today, he is leading the company’s expansion into the Philippines via a new development center in Cebu that opened last year. He brings with him a unique international perspective having lived in the US, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as academic excellence with a Master of Science (MSc) in Intellectual Creation Systems from the Kanazawa Institute of TechnologyKanazawa Institute of Technology.

Fujikura Shigemoto, Director and CTO at Sansan Global Development Center, is available for media interviews to expand on the above as well as discuss:Generative AI has been a big change for the industry to grapple with, forcing companies new and old to think about how to use it in their own business processes.

Technology by itself is neutral, and can be used poorly or well depending on leadership. A change of mindset is required if firms are to take advantage of the powerful capabilities, or get left behind. Software engineers will be expected to develop their own AI in-house, so it’s vital for them to understand how to use AI optimally in development.

The Philippines needs to educate its engineering talent pool and new graduates on using AI technology, and universities must take time to incorporate this into their syllabuses. There will be opportunities for government agencies that still rely heavily on paper invoices and contracts to leverage AI to help them go more fully digital. The country’s senate is already actively debating the impact of AI on jobs.

 
Sansan, the listed Japanese tech leader, has been using optical character recognition (OCR) informed by AI to increase contextualization and enable 99.9% accuracy in its document scanning, as a core capability of its cloud platform since day one. Today, AI plays an important role in Sansan understanding the vast amounts of data that exist on its platform.

 
While the company has no immediate plans to develop its own generative AI, its teams in Tokyo have started using GPT4 as a layer running in the background. For example, in its Contract One service, which digitises contracts for SMEs and corporates, Sansan is leveraging generative AI to provide users with better suggestions. In future, Sansan expects to roll out more such capabilities across its invoicing and other services, and its technical team is actively exploring ways to incorporate machine learning to match duplicates in the Sansan contact management and digitally transformative cloud database.