Branding is a new moat in the AI era

I was invited to speak at the Tokyo AI community event hosted by Ilya Kulyatin. TAI Explorations was a thoughtfully organized event with great atmosphere.

SimilarWeb’s latest data shows Japan leading the world in growth of visits to Gen AI tools, up nearly 300% since December 2024. You can feel that energy at events like the ones TAI hosts in Tokyo.

Brand presence in the AI era

Raphael Hodé is the co-founder of nowthen, supporting startups with creative work. They’re also a pioneer among Framer Experts in Japan. As AI-driven research becomes the norm, startups without a distinctive professional presence risk getting buried. At nowthen, product development used to be the core of their work, but as AI makes building easier, branding projects are taking up a growing share.

Anthony Baker, Managing Director at R/GA Tokyo, gave a deeply practical talk. AI adoption is about building operational teams that combine domain expertise with AI skills to judge what AI produces. One thing he said that stuck with me: “Taste is subjective.” At R/GA, they’ve built self-sustaining systems that evaluate output with objective expertise and iterate from there.

Websites are living things

Here’s an interesting stat: in Framer’s survey of 1,900+ professionals, 84% of teams use AI in their website workflow — mostly for the first draft. Meanwhile, 53% of the work is improving existing pages. Websites are living things. Teams need to grow them. That friction needs to be removed.

During Q&A, someone in the audience asked how we think about competition. My answer: over 80% of websites in Japan still run on WordPress. This market is still wide open. For 10 years, I have been committed to transforming how teams operate, collaborate, iterate, and differentiate through their websites. And this is the most exciting time yet.