Geodesic Forum 2025: Accelerating AI Adoption in the Enterprise
Written byMarcus Otsuji
Executive summary:
Every year, Geodesic Capital invites leading technology company CEOs to Tokyo for a three-day program with key Japanese executives, potential partners, customers and service providers. At Geodesic Forum 2025 “AI in the Enterprise” 19 US startups representing the best in enterprise AI, gathered in Tokyo along with hundreds of Japanese executives and IT professionals. Three clear lessons emerged from the hundreds of meetings, presentations and conversations hosted at Forum. In our reflection below, we go over those lessons, plus a summary of the activities and events encompassing Forum, as well as “key takeaways” companies should consider as they plan and execute their AI strategies.
Introduction:
For Geodesic Forum 2025, there was no other choice for a theme than “AI”… again. Despite the lightning speed of new developments, Japanese companies, like corporations worldwide, are aggressively trying to figure out their AI strategies. However, there was one huge difference from last year. While Forum 2024 was mostly about technology (“What can AI do?”) this year Japanese companies had more practical questions, such as, “In the US what are corporations actually buying?” The signal they are looking for in other words is not just investor interest or super cool technical demos, but rather real customer traction. With this in mind, we were honored to have the following US startups travel to Tokyo with us to participate in three full days of one-on-one meetings, conferences, networking, and laboratories:
- Alkira: Cloud networking as-a-service
- Cast: Cloud Infrastructure
- Databricks: Unified data analytics platform
- Dremio: Self-service data lakehouse
- Figma: Collaborative design platform
- CFS: Fusion Power
- Glean: Enterprise search and knowledge
- Hightouch: Data activation for marketing
- OpenAI: Advanced AI model research
- Pendo: Product analytics and guidance
- Poolside: AI for software development
- QAWolf: Automated QA testing platform
- Sardine: Fraud prevention and compliance
- Scale: Data labeling for AI
- Snyk: Developer security platform
- Tanium: Endpoint management and security
- Vercel: Frontend cloud for developers
- Workato: Workflow and app automation
- Writer: Enterprise generative AI platform
Each company has a unique story to tell and represents a piece of the AI puzzle. “AI” after all is being applied literally everywhere.
Here is an overview of what happened over the 3 days of Forum:
One-on-One Meetings: A total of 125 one-on-one meetings took place at the 2025 Forum, involving over 40 Japanese companies who represent the titans of Japan finance, industry, transportation, communications and IT.
Tech Conference: Once again it was a standing room only affair with nearly 500 in attendance at this flagship event hosted by Geodesic Capital founder and former US Ambassador to Japan, John Roos. Glean, Poolside, Workato, OpenAI and Databricks presented alongside Ambassador Roos and Geodesic Capital’s head of investments, Jon Rezneck.
Developer Lab: With software design, development and deployment becoming more mission-critical to all Japanese corporations, and Japan’s persistent shortage of software developers, we held our first-ever Forum event specifically for developers to showcase the latest technologies focused on developer productivity and creativity. A big thank you to Geodesic Capital Limited Partner NS Solutions for hosting the event and to Vercel, Poolside, QAWolf, Figma, and Snyk for making this inaugural event a huge success.
Ambassador’s Residence Executive Reception: We invited senior leaders from industry and government to network with our guests from Silicon Valley in this iconic and historic venue.
Winning in Japan: At the final session of Forum, “Winning in Japan”, the Silicon Valley executives gathered with the Geodesic team to review the events of the week, and learn about and discuss Japan entry best practices. Special guest founders and operators from our portfolio companies also shared important insights learned from the trenches. We also learned from a leading recruiter on hiring to win in Japan.
Key takeaways
Over the course of the hundreds of meetings, presentations and conversations at Forum 2025, three lessons emerged for the successful implementation of AI into an enterprise:
- Get your data ready: Things are changing quickly and will continue to do so. Chasing the newest thing is not a winning strategy. The first thing every company should do to get AI ready is get their data in order, and in our view the best way to do this: Implement Databricks. Full disclosure: Databricks is a Geodesic portfolio company, but we believe this has also clearly played out in the market. No matter what applications you buy or build, what systems you connect to, or how you use your data, it needs to be organized in a format ready for artificial intelligence and Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform has emerged as the technology of choice for corporate and government customers around the world.
- Buy or build: Everything will run on AI so there is no need to build everything. Most applications can be customized to fit your specific needs via model adaptation (fine- tuning, RAG, etc.). So as long as you have your data ready (see point 1 above), you can identify best-of-breed applications to implement and start generating efficiencies and ROI quickly.
- Application design and development is critical and speed matters: Despite number 2 above, in the age of AI, every company is a software company and every company needs to be able to design, develop and deploy compelling employee and customer-facing applications efficiently. Luckily, one of the strongest use cases for AI is software development itself. There are already many incredible AI products optimizing every stage of the development process, from Figma’s DevMode and Vercel’s Developer Cloud vastly simplifying front end design, to development and deployment being supported by QAWolf’s AI powered QA automation, to Snyk’s developer security platform, plus Pendo’s application analytics and optimization platform, and let’s not forget poolside’s LLM for software development. Incredible applications can now be brought to market with vastly fewer resources than was previously required, so using AI to create AI will be a key source of competitive advantage for companies competing in the AI era.
Conclusion:
Over the past 3 years, many incredible innovations have come to market, but it is clear we are still at the very beginning of this the AI revolution in Japan. Where will we be next year? Where will individual companies, industries and countries be in 5 years? The answer to all of those questions will be the result of decisions made today and every day along this journey of investment, competition, cooperation, learning and innovation. As these decisions are made, relationships and information will be critical so we were so happy to see so many new relationships formed at Geodesic Forum 2025 and we look forward to continuing to support fostering these connections throughout the year and beyond.
One-on-One Meetings
Team Glean and Team Vercel having 1:1 meetings with Japanese Enterprise Companies.
Tech Conference
(Top Left) Geodesic Capital Head of Investments Jon Rezneck: The enterprise AI stack
(Top Right) Glean Founder and CEO Arvind Jain: Enterprise Search and AI Platform
(Bottom Left) poolside.ai CRO Paul St. John: AI for software engineering
(Bottom Right) Workato co-founder and CEO Vijay Tela – Enterprise Orchestration for the AI and Agentic Era
Tech Conference
(Top Left) Open AI Japan President Tadao Nagasaki: OpenAI’s mission and product overview
(Top Right) Databricks Japan President Toshifumi Sasa: the Data Intelligence Platform
(Bottom Left) Geodesic Capital Founding Partner & Former U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos
Developer Lab
Ambassador’s Residence Executive Reception
Winning in Japan