The Ceo Of A $55 Billion Conglomerate Explains Why The Japanese Concept Of 'kosoryoku' Is So Important In The Ai Age

• Sumitomo CEO Shingo Ueno believes 'kosoryoku' is a key skill in business.
• The term translates as 'the ability to envision futures that do not yet exist'.
• Ueno says AI can be a helpful research tool, but cannot yet conceptualize the future well.

A little-known Japanese term about imagining the future helps explain both the role — and the limits — of AI in the workplace, according to the CEO of one of the country's largest conglomerates.

Speaking to Business Insider in early September, Shingo Ueno, the head of Sumitomo Corporation, a Japanese multi-industry powerhouse with a market capitalization of around $55 billion, said that AI is a powerful research tool but lacks a crucial human capability: kosoryoku.

Pronounced koh-soh-ryoh-koo, the Japanese term essentially means the power to conceptualize or formulate a vision for the future that has not yet been imagined, something Ueno says AI does not currently have.

"Generative AI is helping me a lot to improve my efficiency. I'm fully utilizing it," Ueno said.

One of its biggest advantages is its ability to retrieve information quickly. "If I want to find information about something the company did before, I might have previously spent a day searching for that experience. Now, the answer comes immediately," he said.

That speed helps Ueno, who has spent over 40 years working for Sumitomo Corporation, follow his preferred management style: resolving issues quickly instead of allowing them to linger.

"My method is to make decisions on the spot," he said. "I try to avoid the back-and-forth — having the same issue come back the next day."

Still, Ueno has found that AI cannot make every decision for him. "I once tried to make a decision using AI, and I just got rubbish answers," he said. "It wasn't usable at all."

The problem, he said, is that AI depends on information from the past. It can identify patterns and suggest possible directions, but it is less capable when it comes to envisioning a future that does not yet exist.

"AI analyzes past data to show us a direction. But it is still based on the past," Ueno said. "It can't create the future. It can't really show the vision."

Developing kosoryoku does not require employees to come up with revolutionary ideas from scratch, he said.

"We don't need to be inventors. We don't need to come up with something completely new," Ueno said. "We can start with something that already exists, improve it, and make it our own."

Separately, Ueno said taking time away from work is important because it allows him to rest and return with new ideas.

"At the weekend, I basically spend my time without thinking about work," he said. "That is extremely important, just resting my head. Then, when I go back to work, I can come up with new ideas."

AI may help executives understand the past in seconds. Ueno's message is that humans must still decide what the future should look like.