Japan's AI enters through the state and the large employer — a generative tool for 180,000 officials, a whole NEC department staffed by agents — under an AI Basic Plan adopted at the end of 2025.
Announced 2025. Its pillars are adopt AI, create AI, enhance AI trustworthiness, collaborate with AI.
Services 71.4% · Industry 26.8% · Agriculture 1% of gross value added — World Bank, 2024
The Digital Agency has given 180,000 officials a generative-AI tool, and Soka City runs Japan's first on-premise municipal system.
Japan28 Aug 2026Soka City (Saitama) — Soka City in Saitama has deployed FIXER's Sovereign GaiXer, on-premise generative AI for drafting internal rules, preparing meeting minutes and building plans from confidential documents. The city says it is Japan's first municipality to adopt it, keeping sensitive data on site, away from public cloud services.
Japan22 Aug 2026Digital Agency (Government of Japan) — Japan's Digital Agency launched Genai, in-house generative AI for civil servants, to about 180,000 officials for translation, writing, meeting transcription, public-comment classification and draft replies to parliamentary questions. Fact-checking and final policy calls remain with staff; broader rollout is aimed at fiscal 2027.
Japan30 Jul 2026Shizuoka City — Shizuoka City has opened a generative AI enquiry system to all staff on Allganize's Alli LLM App Market, answering officers' questions from internal manuals and working documents. Each answer shows the passage it relies on so officers can verify the basis before acting, and the city hopes to shift time saved on internal queries to resident services and policy work.
Japan9 Apr 2026Tokyo Metropolitan Government — The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has fully launched A1, a generative AI platform for government staff, to about 60,000 metropolitan officers after a trial from September 2025. Built by GovTech Tokyo with the Digital Services Bureau, it lets officers build and share no-code AI apps, from contract-specification drafting to AI adoption checkpoints and assembly answers drawn from transcripts.
NEC has created a department staffed entirely by AI agents.
Japan11 Aug 2026NEC — NEC has set up an AI agent department with no human staff: 'worker' agents run automation tasks under AI 'manager' agents, which answer to human supervisors. The company aims to lift productivity by separating human and AI work more clearly; the department's size and output were not disclosed.
Japan26 Dec 2025SOMPO Holdings — SOMPO Holdings began rolling out an in-house AI agent for employees, about 30,000 across domestic group companies, from January 2026, including all staff at SOMPO Holdings and core operating company Sompo Japan. With Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise as the main tool, the group is testing what the agent actually changes about work. The goal is a foundation for reworking practices and processes rather than tinkering with them.
SMBC runs a generative-AI voice operator on its Olive line, and Tokio Marine has put AI across its customer and agency contact centres.
Japan4 Mar 2026Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance — Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance put AI contact centre tools across its customer and agency lines on a PKSHA Technology and CTC platform. PKSHA VoiceAgent captures callers' identity and purpose from natural speech before routing, Speech Insight provides live transcription and suggested answers for operators, and Knowledge Stream drafts knowledge-base entries afterwards. It expects up to about 30 per cent shorter handling on customer calls and about 10 per cent on agency calls, freeing operators for specialist work.
Japan18 Feb 2026Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation — Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation started SMBC AI Operator, a generative AI call centre line with technology from the Japan Research Institute and IBM Japan, on 25 February 2026. 24/7 it takes free-speech calls on the Olive personal finance product's application steps, campaigns, annual fees and service content, answering from bank reference data and passing callers to a human operator for identity checks during call-centre hours. The voice operator adapts phrasing and tone to each caller's way of speaking.
Japan has adopted a code asking AI firms to disclose their training data, carrying no legal force or penalties.
Japan26 Aug 2026Government of Japan — Japan's government has adopted principles on AI training data disclosure, pressing generative AI operators to share basic facts with users, rights holders and the public. Operators should publish an overview of their automated online data-collection tools, tell rights holders on request whether their works were used, and file their implementation with the Cabinet Office, updating it yearly. The non-binding principles carry no penalties and cover foreign as well as Japanese firms offering AI services in the country.
ClassNK answers ship-survey questions through an AI assistant.
Japan25 Aug 2026ClassNK — ClassNK has launched 'Survey Compass', a natural-language AI ship survey assistant answering shipowners' and managers' classification-survey questions via its customer portal. For accuracy in safety-critical work it relies on retrieval-based answers drawn from, and linking back to, source documents instead of generating unsourced text.
Every entry on this page is a named organisation putting AI to work in a real job, taken from the State of Applied AI record. Each one is traced to the report it came from and dated, and where a figure is the organisation’s own the entry says so rather than presenting it as an independent result. Readiness, ecosystem and policy figures, where shown, are attributed on the card to the body that published them.
The record is maintained continuously by the Industrial Research Unit of the Straits Institute for Applied AI: entries are added as they are found and verified, not on a schedule, and nothing is published without an open source behind it. It currently holds 1114 entries across 249 countries.
Singapore
South Korea
China
Azerbaijan
India
Australia
Malaysia
Pakistan
Hong Kong
Philippines
Cambodia
Kyrgyzstan
Armenia
Cyprus
Thailand
Brunei
Georgia
Macao
Tajikistan
Fiji
Guam
Kazakhstan
Maldives
Papua New Guinea
Taiwan
Uzbekistan