What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have been involved in over the past year?
One of the focus areas of HP is to provide solutions for challenges users face in a hybrid work environment. From this perspective, one of the significant transactions I was involved in over the past year is a collaboration with a mobile carrier to realise seamless connectivity regardless of where hybrid workers are working. This is the first-ever collaboration of this kind in Japan and has been very well received. This collaboration has brought successful results for HP Japan, while leading to many key takeaways from a legal perspective – from regulations to contracts.

What is a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about, and why?
Since 2022, I’ve been acting as a volunteer English tutor for underprivileged high school students in a program run by an NPO. I came to know this program through HP Japan’s collaboration with this NPO to promote digital equity by setting up an eSports education facility in Tokyo. I’m a strong believer that language skill can deepen and widen everyone’s future opportunity whatever dreams we may be pursuing, and this will remain the same even in the AI era where machine translation and online meeting captions are improving day by day. On this, I have a lot to say about how English is taught in typical Japanese education system, and think it a real pity if children are not given any opportunity to know the joy of learning English outside the school due to their economic situation. I may not have the power to reform the Japanese education system, but I’m hoping that volunteering activities can be a small contribution from my end for paying forward to the future generation. As this program always needs more volunteers, we regularly recruit volunteers from HP Japan employees – globally HP encourages its employees to volunteer, and I personally try to spread the words about this whenever I have a chance as well.

Are the effects of AI on the legal world overplayed, or underplayed?
Maybe both. It may be overplayed when people say that AI could make lawyers extinct, but underplayed when people say that AI can only replace lawyers in entry level jobs or routines. I started using AI tools in my day-to-day job only a few months ago, but it’s evident that the key component of AI use is us users. For example, we all have heard that people are saying how AI responds or can provide information we needed depends on how good our prompt is articulated, but seeing is believing. By using AI tools by myself, this came home to my bosom, and it really takes trial and error to come up with a good prompt. Also, we cannot skip human check before using the response or information we get from AI tools to ensure we are factually correct. In my opinion based on my limited experience, lawyers would not be extinct if we are willing to learn how to utilise AI tools for our work, but if we don’t, we may be replaced with AI tools itself or other lawyers who have no issue with trying AI tools even if we are not in entry level. For this, I will keep exploring AI tools to avoid being extinct or replaced especially as a person working for a company selling AI PCs.