How Bespoke faked AI until it actually worked (w/ Akemi Tsunagawa) | E2320

Bespoke founder Akemi Tsunagawa launched Bebot in 2015 as a multilingual chatbot for tourists in Japan at a time when investors doubted people would communicate with AI for help. To get around investor skepticism and technical limitations, her team manually impersonated the bot in real conversations until the software caught up. When the chatbot broke during Christmas high season, Tsunagawa personally acted as the bot for a week without sleep and discovered that more human-like interaction patterns sharply increased user engagement. Bespoke copied those patterns into the actual chatbot, and engagement rose. Narita Airport signed on after 2017 because information counter staff were quitting from the stress of handling queries across multiple languages, and Bespoke built its multilingual chat technology entirely in-house rather than relying on Google or any existing service.

Japan now receives 60 million tourists per year, driven partly by the weak yen making it one of the most affordable high-quality destinations and partly by loosened visa requirements. Overtourism has been a recognized problem since roughly 2017 to 2018, and some restaurants and traditional inns have stopped accepting non-Japanese guests over manner and crowding concerns. Separately, Japan loses 700,000 to 800,000 people annually, a figure expected to approach 1 million per year. Tsunagawa attributes the birth rate collapse partly to the cost of raising children in Tokyo and wages failing to keep pace with inflation. Government pressure to raise wages has produced meaningful increases only at large corporations, as smaller firms cannot pass higher labor costs to customers.

Because the shrinking workforce leaves too few workers for service industries, Japan has been importing labor from Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines for construction, shipyards, hotels, restaurants, and nursing. Japan historically framed these arrangements as trainee programs rather than immigration. A 2019 regulatory change allowed workers in specified industries to enter as workers rather than trainees, with a five-year stay limit unless they pass qualifying exams, after which near-permanent residency becomes possible. New regulations require incoming workers to hold at least N4 on Japan's Japanese Language Proficiency Test, a level Tsunagawa described as roughly equivalent to the language ability of a ten-year-old Japanese child. A common integration flashpoint is garbage disposal, where instructions are written only in Japanese and are complex enough that foreign workers frequently fail to follow them.

Bespoke built a second product called Be Trained to help foreign workers understand the specific cultural expectations of full-time work in Japan. Experienced Japanese tradespeople wear smart glasses to record how they perform tasks, and the footage is converted into multilingual training videos with automatically generated quizzes so HR managers can verify comprehension. This translation layer is necessary because skilled tradespeople typically speak only Japanese and cannot directly instruct foreign workers. How well foreign workers meet Japanese Kaizen standards depends heavily on the individual company and industry. Japanese shipbuilding companies illustrate the labor shortage acutely, with some firms that previously produced nine ships per year now producing only six because they cannot find enough workers, even as order books stretch three years out.

Bespoke identified a third business line in robotics for industrial inspection after shipbuilding and construction clients asked for automation help. Scaffold inspection is legally required daily at construction sites and shipyards but is skipped almost 100 percent of the time due to resource constraints, resulting in preventable injuries and fatalities. Paint thickness inspection on ships over 200 meters currently requires more than 1,000 human hours per vessel, costing roughly 20,000 dollars per ship at 20 dollars per hour. Tsunagawa estimates one robot could handle at least four types of inspections, and that ten robots supervised by one person could replace ten separate human positions. Bespoke is addressing the challenge that shiny metal surfaces at shipyards cause reflection problems for robot vision by using VDOM.

Bespoke has raised approximately 450 million Japanese yen, roughly 3 million US dollars in total, with its last venture round closing in March 2020 during COVID. Since then the company has been self-sufficient, using government contracts as collateral for bank loans rather than continuing to raise venture capital. Japanese banks will lend against the value of a government contract once a company turns profitable, and Bespoke secured one loan with a 10-year term at approximately 1 percent interest. Early-stage startups in Japan cannot access this mechanism because profitability is a prerequisite. Tsunagawa's plan for the next two years is to focus on Japan, get robots operational, acquire small factories, apply Kaizen principles, and then take the model overseas, including potentially buying a small shipyard to deploy their own robots as a proof of concept. Japan has a structural succession problem where many profitable companies shut down simply because no one takes them over, which Tsunagawa sees as an acquisition opportunity. Global expansion including markets like the Middle East is under consideration but not planned for at least two years.