Arab News Japan

TOKYO: Japanese think-tank the Institute for International Strategy and Information (IISIA) has made a proposal to use AI to assist civil servants in improving policy making.

IISIA announced that it made the proposal, called “AI-Driven Technocrats for Social Design,” at a meeting of a group associated with the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. It said Japan’s bureaucracy suffers from “foundational problems” that remain unsolved.

It refers to Japan’s so-called “lost three decades” following the economic collapse in the 1990s. Leadership, it says, is “visibly fraying.”

“In this vacuum, the national bureaucracy – shielded by tenure and institutional memory – has become one of the few anchors of stability,” the report says. “Instruments such as evidence-based policymaking were meant to moor decisions in demonstrable facts, but in practice have lost political traction.”

IISIA’s proposal envisages civil servants trained in AI science and data literacy who can “define social problems rigorously, design and test policy with transparent, auditable analytics, and discharge accountability through reproducible, contestable evidence.”

The aim, it says, is to stabilize governance and restore public trust by making state decisions intelligible and verifiable.

IISIA’s founder HARADA Takeo has launched a student-governed seminar at the University of Tokyo titled “Entrepreneurship, AI and Global Leadership.” The program, IISIA says, features hands-on practice –framing social-problem definition, data-driven policy design, and accountable implementation – so that students can envision themselves not only as candidates for the central ministries but as the AI-literate technocrats Japan now needs.