Many Japanese hoteliers recognise the potential benefits of AI for their business but each use case is not without a sizable subset of hoteliers who do not find it beneficial. The strongest support for AI is in fraud prevention and cybersecurity, with around 6 in 10 hoteliers recognising this area as a (very) helpful use case for AI. But even for the most popular use case, almost 1 in 5 do not find AI useful for fraud prevention.

Similarly, marketing and communication, as well as customer service, are seen as other promising areas and yet around 20% of respondents do not see AI’s value in this instance. For operational tasks – such as housekeeping schedules and staff training – accommodation managers appear more skeptical about the value AI can deliver, however even these processes have attracted.

The 2025 Japan Accommodation Barometer is the second study of hoteliers conducted by Statista in collaboration with Booking.com, surveying 260 accommodation executives and managers from across Japan. Click here to download the full report (only available in Japanese).

JAPAN, December 15, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ — United Cybersecurity Alliance (UCA) and SAYA, in proud partnership with SEGA SAMMY Holdings Inc., will host the Cybersecurity Woman of Japan 2025 Awards on December 17 at Tunnel Tokyo.

Now in its third year, the awards bring together leaders across government, enterprise, academia, and Japan’s cybersecurity community to honor the remarkable women who are strengthening the nation’s digital resilience and elevating global cybersecurity leadership.

This year’s program features multiple award categories recognizing outstanding female professionals contributing to technological innovation, cyber defense, education, threat intelligence, and workforce development in Japan and abroad. By elevating role models for current and future generations, the awards aim to expand leadership opportunities and foster a more diverse and robust cybersecurity talent base.

Serving as the overall Masters of Ceremony are Natsue Ishida, Executive Officer & Group Privacy Officer of SEGA SAMMY Holdings Inc., and Jonathan Hiroshi Rossi, Co-founder of SAYA University.
Ms. Ishida is widely regarded for her leadership in compliance, privacy governance, and intellectual property, while Mr. Rossi is an international advocate for cybersecurity awareness, digital learning, and diversity in the security workforce. Together, they will guide an evening dedicated to highlighting the achievements of women protecting Japan’s digital ecosystem.

2025 turned out pretty much as I anticipated. What comes next?

AGI didn’t materialize (contra predictions from Elon Musk and others); GPT-5 was underwhelming, and didn’t solve hallucinations. LLMs still aren’t reliable; the economics look dubious. Few AI companies aside from Nvidia are making a profit, and nobody has much of a technical moat. OpenAI has lost a lot of its lead. Many would agree we have reached a point of diminishing returns for scaling; faith in scaling as a route to AGI has dissipated. Neurosymbolic AI (a hybrid of neural networks and classical approaches) is starting to rise. No system solved more than 4 (or maybe any) of the Marcus-Brundage tasks. Despite all the hype, agents didn’t turn out to be reliable. Overall, by my count, sixteen of my seventeen “high confidence” predictions about 2025 proved to be correct.

Here are six or seven predictions for 2026; the first is a holdover from last year that no longer will surprise many people.

1. We won’t get to AGI in 2026 (or 7). At this point I doubt many people would publicly disagree, but just a few months ago the world was rather different. Astonishing how much the vibe has shifted in just a few months, especially with people like Sutskever and Sutton coming out with their own concerns.
2. Human domestic robots like Optimus and Figure will be all demo and very little product. Reviews by Joanna Stern and Marques Brownle of one early prototype were damning; there will be tons of lab demos but getting these robots to work in people’s homes will be very very hard, as Rodney Brooks has said many times.
3. No country will take a decisive lead in the GenAI “race”.
4. Work on new approaches such as world models and neurosymbolic will escalate.
5. 2025 will be known as the year of the peak bubble, and also the moment at which Wall Street began to lose confidence in generative AI. Valuations may go up before they fall, but the Oracle craze early in September and what has happened since will in hindsight be seen as the beginning of the end.
6. Backlash to Generative AI and radical deregulation will escalate. In the midterms, AI will be an election issue for first time. Trump may eventually distance himself from AI because of this backlash.

And lastly, the seventh: a metaprediction, which is a prediction about predictions. I don’t expect my predictions to be as on target this year as last, for a happy reason: across the field, the intellectual situation has gone from one that was stagnant (all LLMs all the time) and unrealistic (“AGI is nigh”) to one that is more fluid, more realistic, and more open-minded. If anything would lead to genuine progress, it would be that.