Aug 3, 2026 · 1h 2m
How Bespoke faked its AI chatbot to win major enterprise clients
How Bespoke faked AI until it actually worked (w/ Akemi Tsunagawa) | E2320
This episode demonstrates how founders can use creative hacks to validate technology and how Japan's demographic crisis is fueling a new wave of robotics and automation startups.
- 1Faking AI capabilities early on can serve as a powerful customer development tool to understand user behavior.
- 2Japan's severe labor shortage is opening massive startup opportunities in foreign worker training and industrial robotics.
- 3Acquiring successor-less traditional factories and modernizing them with automation represents a major new investment thesis.
Don't miss
Akemi Tsunagawa describes a holiday crisis where she had to manually act as the chatbot, yielding key insights into human-like AI interactions.
The brief
When Akemi Tsunagawa launched her multilingual chatbot startup Bebot in 2015, the underlying artificial intelligence was not ready. To secure early enterprise clients, she manually answered user queries herself behind the scenes to prove the market.
This hands-on approach helped scale the company, eventually landing major clients like Narita Airport. Tsunagawa argues that faking the technology early on is a viable customer development hack that reveals what users actually want from automated systems.
Beyond chatbots, Tsunagawa is leveraging technology to address Japan's severe labor shortage and rapid population decline. Her newer ventures use smart glasses to train foreign blue-collar workers and deploy robotics to automate dangerous shipyard inspections.
Tsunagawa's ultimate vision is a roll-up strategy: acquiring profitable, successor-less Japanese factories and modernizing them with robots. Her journey shows how demographic crises can drive practical, hardware-enabled startup opportunities.
Featuring
Japan
Artificial IntelligenceListen to the full episode and explore every guest, topic, and moment on PodLume.