June 28, 2025 | BIZ Café, University of Tokyo
On June 28, 2025, the AI+X Global Talent Community (GTC) hosted its first-ever in-person event — just six weeks after the GTC Founding Group was officially formed on May 16.
This milestone wasn’t built by chance — it was driven by student leaders across six countries: the U.S., Korea, Japan, Singapore, Mexico, and Pakistan. Meeting online every other weekend, they co-designed this gathering across time zones and disciplines.
In late June, our Korean founding members flew to Tokyo to meet their Japanese teammates in person — and together, they brought GTC to life.
Speakers Who Inspired
We were honored to welcome an incredible lineup of speakers leading AI+X innovation across industries:
Hiroyuki (Hugh) Matsushita – Country Manager, Upstage Japan
Upstage AI's mission, growth story, products (Document AI and Solar LLM), education programs, internship opportunities.
Noriko Suzuki – Global Automotive & Electronics Leader, IBM Institute for Business Value
Outlook for mobility and technology in 2035: electrification, shared mobility, software/AI growth, AI applications in the automotive industry.
Takeshi Tanaka – Senior Manager, Mobility Business, Bosch Japan
Bosch Japan's company overview, AI initiatives (kickoff events, hackathons, AI Day), internal digitalization and AI use case development.
Karthik Rampalli – Business Development Manager, Ceremorphic
AI evolution (2016-2025), new requirements (privacy, latency, etc.), AI interpretation and challenges, AI applications in drug discovery.
Prof. Yusuke Sugano – Associate Professor, Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo
From AI + Computer Vision to AI + Inclusive Design: gaze estimation technology, dataset challenges, gamified data collection, participatory AI and inclusive AI creation in the LLMs era.
A Community in Motion
Attendees came from Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Johannesburg, and beyond — students from UTokyo, Waseda, Shibaura Tech, international visitors, and GTC alumni. Many had never met before. But within minutes, roundtables lit up with ideas:
What does “AI+X” look like in your country?
What real-world problems do you want to solve?
How can we make AI more inclusive, across every field?
Together, they explored, connected, and planted the seeds for cross-border collaborations to come.
Why It Matters
As highlighted on our GTC homepage:
“7 in 10 students worldwide have zero access to formal AI education.”
This number is more than data — it’s a call to action.
GTC was created to answer that call — to make AI education accessible to everyone, everywhere. That mission shaped every detail of this event, from who we invited to how we facilitated.
With zero full-time staff and zero borders, the GTC Founding Group co-led a fully student-powered international gathering in under six weeks.
What’s Next?
The Tokyo event was just the beginning. GTC will continue growing — with more in-person meetups, speaker sessions, student showcases, and global peer projects planned across Boston, Singapore, Seoul, Cape Town, and more.
We invite learners, professors, industry partners, and student clubs to join the journey.
→ [Join the Global Talent Community]
Special Thanks
To our founding organizers — John, Seungbeom, Seoyeon, Haru, Alice, Nam, Yasmeen, — and to all who showed up with curiosity, openness, and purpose.
This is what happens when students lead — and the world listens.
