ITR analyst: Japan firms 'almost absent' from harness engineering

Koumoto frames the shift as a change in what the industry argues about. Model performance debates have run their course, and the focus is moving to how AI agents are given autonomy — in other words, to harness engineering. Japanese firms, he says, are largely still at the earlier stage of applying AI piecemeal: upstream design, coding, and testing handled as separate tasks, with no integrated agent-driven development process in place.

The deeper cause he cites is structural. Years of 'dependence on major SIers and outsourcing' left many Japanese companies without their own application development know-how or in-house engineers. Business leaders, he says, have started to realize this over the past two to three years, but awareness alone does not create skilled people, and some had hoped AI would let them build applications without them — a hope he describes as an illusion.

His practical advice is to treat application development as the core of business competitiveness and innovation, rather than a cost to be outsourced, and to accept that the first three years may bring no direct return. Koumoto's own comparison is with the shift to agile development after 2015, which took two to three years to take hold in Japan once companies committed. Whether Japanese firms genuinely change course within five years, he suggests, will decide which ones remain competitive.