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

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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.

VMware’s Comprehensive Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Solution Empowers IT Teams with Data-Driven Insights to Improve Employee Experience and Achieve Valuable Cost Savings

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New feature enhancements with DEEM and ITSM Connector for ServiceNow further advance VMware’s Digital Employee Experience solution and empower IT teams to operate with efficiency and agility



Digital employee experience (DEX) technology has become essential as it not only enables organizations with the tools needed to provide great employee experiences, but also empowers IT teams to work more efficiently, yielding tangible cost savings. But present DEX solutions are fragmented and require multiple technology platforms and vendors to measure, analyze, deliver, and remediate workplace experiences. A unified approach is needed, and today, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) is announcing four unique enhancements to further its comprehensive DEX solution: the general availability of DEX for 3rd party managed devices, DEX for VMware Horizon, AI-driven Guided RCA, as well as the intent to expand Workspace ONE ITSM Connector for ServiceNow support of available remediation actions. These innovations combine to advance VMware’s commitment to deliver the only holistic DEX solution, which helps to increase productivity and provide faster issue remediation, enabling higher employee engagement.

“Organizations across industries are struggling to keep up with the increased IT incidents and growing employee turnover rates as they navigate the new challenges brought on by hybrid work. Successful organizations must prioritize technology that enables IT teams with the right tools to not only resolve issues faster, but prevent them from happening in the future,” said Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “VMware’s comprehensive DEX solution uses automation to enable IT teams with data-driven insights that enable improved efficiency and great experiences for employees.”



Scalable Platform Supports a Diverse Set of Use Cases

VMware progresses its DEX solution by unifying employee experience measurement across all endpoints, whether physical or virtual and VMware or 3rd party managed. Today, VMware announced that its Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) solution is now generally available for Windows devices managed by 3rd party solutions. With this update, VMware’s entire DEX offering, including Intelligent Hub, DEEM, and Assist, is now available for these devices. Even if a customer has standardized on other management solutions, this capability provides customers with more flexibility in how they deploy and grow their DEX solution.

For customers ready to extend measurement to virtual apps and desktops, VMware today announced that DEEM is also generally available for VMware Horizon. Customers can measure and analyze end-user experiences using Horizon virtual apps and desktops, bringing together network performance, log on time, and VM performance. If the experience score for Horizon changes, IT will be proactively alerted with automated notifications, enabling teams to more efficiently resolve issues impacting employee productivity using the Horizon platform for work.


A Comprehensive DEX Approach Allows IT to Remediate More Issues and “Shift Left”

Organizations cannot achieve a seamless employee experience without also controlling experience delivery and issues remediation. Today, VMware offers the only comprehensive solution that creates a closed loop cycle that allows IT to shift left, leveraging holistic experience data to proactively resolve issues and continuously improve employee experiences. With the VMware Workspace ONE award-winning unified endpoint management capabilities, customers have access to the broadest scope of remediation capabilities available today.

When experience issues arise, service desk teams are the first line of support for employees. By extending the same experience data that IT views in Workspace ONE into ServiceNow via VMware’s ITSM Connector, service desk teams can troubleshoot and resolve issues more efficiently. Today, VMware unveils further innovations to ITSM Connector including experience scoring, an expanded set of unified endpoint management actions, and the ability to trigger workflows created by IT teams in VMware Freestyle Orchestrator. By leveraging experience scores, the service desk can proactively resolve other potential issues impacting a user before it escalates and hinders workflow. These expanded remediation actions and workflows will continue to help decrease the time required to troubleshoot and resolve each issue.

“Our business runs on 200,000-plus smartphones and tablets deployed for our corporate users and frontline workers, visiting all citizens in France and through our distribution network (17,000 point-of-sale),” said Olivier Bombe, Head of Digital Workspace, Groupe La Poste. “With an integrated approach provided by VMware Workspace ONE, we give our IT and service desk teams visibility into issues impacting employee productivity, simplified troubleshooting, and automated remediation. Our service desk is empowered to improve Service Level Agreement for issues, and this has resulted in savings in engineering hours.”



Tangible ROI through Data-Driven Experience Management

IT teams are expected to manage more with less resources than ever before. VMware’s DEX offerings empower IT through Insights, Guided Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and Automation, enabling a proactive approach to IT. With AI-driven insights, IT organizations have immediate visibility into issues that are impacting employee productivity by using statistical machine learning models to automatically detect and score anomalies in experience. Guided RCA, now generally available, uses AI to identify the likely root cause of an issue with an associated confidence score. This helps reduce the time and effort required to identify the problem source. With integrated automation workflows, the appropriate remediation actions can be taken moving forward, scaling issue resolution and proactive employee notification. Recently, a VMware customer experiencing a pervasive laptop crash was able to identify the root cause using Guided RCA. Working with their application teams, the customer was able to resolve the issue quickly, saving them hundreds of engineering hours in lost productivity troubleshooting.



“VMware IT has been using DEX to shift to a more proactive, data-driven IT approach,” said Pam Cocca, vice president, IT Colleague Experience and Technology, VMware. “Not only has this saved engineering hours in resolving issues faster and at scale, but it has created colleague confidence in our IT organization. Using DEEM for Insights and proactive support, VMware IT has realized, on average, 35% reduction in mean time to resolution of support issues over the past six months1. This saves valuable IT time and returns employees to productivity quicker.”

Agam-agam sa Agham: The current and future prospects of science communication in the Philippines

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What can be done to improve weather and disaster reporting in the Philippines? How are scientists portrayed in Pinoy movies and pop culture? Where can we find the best examples of science communication for Filipino online viewers? When can we hope to develop a science-appreciative Filipino culture?

Explore the answers to these and other questions at "Agam-agam sa Agham: The current state and future prospects of science communication in the Philippines". This free public lecture is a joint initiative of the UP Diliman College of Science (UPD-CS) and Science Communicators Philippines (SciCommPH). it will be held on June 30 (Friday), 2pm - 5pm at the UPD-CS Auditorium. It will also be streamed live to registered participants.

You can reserve a slot at the event and receive the Zoom login details by registering here: https://bit.ly/SciCommLectureReg

The list of distinguished speakers includes:

Inez Z. Ponce de Leon, PhD, holds undergraduate and master's degrees in molecular biology and biotechnology from UP, and a PhD in science communication from Purdue University. Her research centers on science and risk communication, and the public understanding of science. She teaches classes in qualitative research, science and risk communication, and belly dance as an associate professor at the Ateneo de Manila University. She is also a public speaker, writer, novelist, and weekly columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


Garry Jay S. Montemayor, MA, a faculty member and former Chair of the Department of Science Communication, College of Development Communication, UP Los Baños. He has been teaching for 16 years now, usually handling courses on science communication, communication research, and information and knowledge management. His diverse experience with various local, national, and international organizations includes development work in health, agriculture, and environment. He has authored over 45 scholarly papers and publications, the most recent of which is a chapter in a book about science communication in the Philippines, published by the Australian National University Press. His masters' thesis is about the portrayal of scientists in Philippine cinema and pop culture.


Kamila Navarro, MSc, the Scientific Writer and Editor of the National University of Singapore’s (NUS') Synthetic Biology for Clinical & Technological Innovation. Previously, she was Science Editor of award-winning science and technology publication, Asian Scientist Magazine. Kamila also helped pioneer a curriculum for Science and Risk Communication in the Philippines, and published an article and book chapter on the state of Philippine science communication; both works are regularly cited and used by the Philippine Department of Science and Technology in their outreach activities. Currently, Kamila runs the day-to-day operations of Pinoy Scientists, a platform highlighting the unique scientific stories of Filipinos worldwide. She is also a member of the International Science Council’s Panel of Experts for the Public Value of Science


Ingrid Espinosa, MSc, received her degree in Science Communication from Imperial College London under a Chevening scholarship She has worked for over half a decade in public health research, studying public health programs and helping inform policy, and currently works as a Senior Strategic Communications Specialist for the National Institutes of Health and Co-Director for Comms & Events at GradMAP Philippines. She’s interested in science journalism, science and society, and improv theater.


Timothy James M. Dimacali, SM, heads the Science Communications Team at the UP Diliman College of Science and is Vice President for External Affairs at SciComm Philippines. He received his MS in Science Writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Fulbright scholarship, and is the founding editor of GMA News Online's Science and Technology Section.

SciCommPH is a non-stock, non-profit national organization of scicomm practitioners and researchers, journalists, and scientists.