The demographic reality quickly becomes apparent when you stroll through any mid-sized Japanese city these days. schools where the hallways are only partially occupied. Employees long past retirement age work in municipal offices. a nation that, according to statistics, is running out of citizens to govern itself. It’s Tuesday morning in Osaka, so it’s no longer a prediction.
That’s precisely where businesses like Agent can help. Koji Shinomiya founded Agent, which has spent years positioning itself at the nexus of AI adoption, educational technology, and something less common in the business sector: a sincere attempt at social problem-solving. Currently, the company provides ICT implementation support to over 4,000 elementary schools throughout Japan. While this figure may seem impressive on paper, it takes on greater significance when you consider what it actually entails in practice.
It goes beyond simply giving teachers tablets and leaving. Agent assigns Chief Digital Officers—strategic advisors tasked with helping administrators understand not just how to use new tools but also why they matter and where they fit within a larger institutional vision—to each education board, in addition to deploying hundreds of on-site support staff. Shinomiya appears to be subtly adamant about the distinction between tool deployment and true digital literacy. “If leadership lacks digital literacy, implementation will almost always fail,” he said. It’s the kind of thing that seems obvious until you consider how many digital transformation initiatives fail precisely in that manner.
Universities in Japan are under a different kind of pressure. In 2024, the number of international students enrolled reached a record 336,708, up more than 20% from the year before. However, domestic enrollment is declining, with the number of 18-year-olds approaching all-time lows. Institutions are caught between growing international expectations and contracting domestic markets.
This gap is being filled with AI tools. In April 2025, Keio University implemented AI-based admissions screening. Meiji University set up chatbots to answer thousands of questions from students every day. A collaborative generative AI project involving about 50,000 students and 400,000 alumni was started by NTT West and Ritsumeikan University. These are no longer pilot studies. They are evolving into infrastructure.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider Shinomiya’s perspective on AI. He rejects the fearful narrative that human thought is being undermined by automation. Rather, he presents it almost as a mental bandwidth argument, arguing that AI can handle the repetitive, mechanical cognitive tasks, freeing up humans for the parts that genuinely call for creativity, empathy, and judgment. In the context of education, this means that while the teacher concentrates on whether a student appears disengaged, afraid, or quietly brilliant, AI takes care of practice generation and performance analysis. That framing has an almost upbeat quality, and it doesn’t seem forced coming from him.
It is still genuinely unclear if Japan will be able to carry out this vision on a large scale. The nation has a complex relationship with change; while it is culturally resistant to disruption in some areas, it can adapt remarkably when the need arises. That need might be the labor shortage. Analysts predict that within ten years, the workforce gap will widen to the point where automation is more of a survival condition than a competitive advantage.
The agent appears to comprehend this. The company’s strategy, which is localized, end-to-end, and deeply ingrained in the institutions it serves, suggests that it is more interested in solving a Japanese problem with Japanese precision than in creating a global platform. It’s unclear if that model will be able to travel overseas, even in part. However, observing it in action here gives the impression that the most beneficial innovations frequently begin as workable solutions to extremely specific, pressing issues rather than as lofty ideals. There is currently no scarcity of those in Japan.
