Japan's top bank CEOs back AI while easing fears over possible job losses

By Taiga Uranaka and Takashi Nakamichi

 

The heads of Japan’s biggest financial firms are going out of their way to assuage worries that artificial intelligence will take away jobs. 

 

“I don’t think humans will lose their value. Humans have ability for dialogue, empathy, creativity and ethics,” Mizuho Financial Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Masahiro Kihara said on Thursday at an event hosted by the Nikkei.  “People might say, ‘what about my job if we use more AI?’ I think they can aim for more value-added work.”

 

Banks around the world have been grappling with how to adapt to AI, with the technology seen to boost efficiency while changing the nature of jobs. In Japan, where the financial sector employs hundreds of thousands of people, the conversation over AI and its impact on work is picking up pace.   

 

Daiwa Securities Group Inc., Japan’s second-largest brokerage after Nomura Holdings Inc., is telling its managers to use AI “as much as possible,” CEO Akihiko Ogino said at the same event. The firm needs to “collaborate” with the tech as it hastens decision-making and helps workers perform better, he said.

 

AI will become a partner, not just a tool, said Hironori Kamezawa, CEO of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., the country’s largest banking group. “We need to change ourselves to an AI native company.” Kamezawa had spent a chunk of the firm’s most recent annual report ruminating over the essence of AI, concluding that what is required of humans is a “high level of thinking and the ability to act.” 

 

For Nomura’s CEO Kentaro Okuda, it boils down to a division of labor. “Let AI do what AI can do and humans do value-added work,” Okuda said. “That works positively in an aging Japan.”