Tokyo's AI scene lives on connpass and in exhibition halls out at Makuhari, which makes most of it invisible if you do not read Japanese.This page covers both ends — the enormous enterprise expos and the small, hands-on community nights — with the language reality stated rather than assumed, because turning up to a Japanese-first meetup with no Japanese is a wasted evening. The list Metis AI keeps for its own clients.
5 events in the next 90 days · 2 more on the horizon · times local to JST (UTC+9) · last updated 4 August 2026
A Japanese-language evening talk from Tokyo AI Lab, one of Japan's largest AI communities, digging into vision-language-action models, world models and dexterity as the building blocks of physical/embodied AI in robotics.
Who it’s for: Robotics and ML engineers with working Japanese — this one is Japanese-first with no interpretation. Business attendees without the language should skip it.
Mercari Tokyo Office, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, Minato Ward, Tokyo
A two-day, company-run hackathon at Mercari's Tokyo HQ where roughly 40 selected students build AI-agent solutions to real product problems, judged more on problem framing than raw engineering polish.
Who it’s for: Students only, roughly forty places. Worth forwarding to a graduate hire or an intern — not something a working professional can attend.
The Agentic AI Foundation's Asia-Pacific flagship developer conference for the open agentic-AI ecosystem, bringing together contributors and enterprises building on the Model Context Protocol and related agent-system standards.
Who it’s for: The one Tokyo event a technical leader building on agent standards should not miss. English-language, Linux Foundation-run, and much closer to the standards work than to marketing.
ConferencePrice TBCVerified 4 Aug
Organised by Agentic AI Foundation / Linux Foundation
Ubie Office, Nihonbashi Life Science Building, Chuo Ward, Tokyo
A small, business-side (non-engineer) hackathon from the Loglass/LayerX/Ubie-founded AI Ops Community, focused on using AI slash commands to automate everyday internal operations rather than software engineering per se.
Who it’s for: Business-side operators, explicitly not engineers — the rare hands-on session aimed at internal operations rather than software. Japanese-language.
HackathonPrice TBCVerified 4 Aug
Organised by AI Ops Community (Loglass, LayerX, Ubie)
A large multi-show B2B exhibition (about 700 exhibitors, 31,000 visitors) where the co-located Japan DX & AX Week puts AI-driven transformation, automation and enterprise AI tooling alongside broader IT/digital-marketing/e-commerce exhibits.
Who it’s for: Enterprise buyers doing vendor discovery at scale. Free entry, around seven hundred exhibitors, and mostly Japanese-language at booth level — bring a colleague who reads Japanese.
ExpoFreeVerified 4 Aug
Organised by RX Japan Ltd.
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On the horizon
Confirmed, but more than 90 days out. Worth diarising now if travel or budget approval is involved.
Two Tokyo AI scenes run in parallel and barely overlap. The first is the exhibition-hall circuit at Makuhari Messe out in Chiba — Japan IT Week, NexTech Week, AI EXPO — free to attend, enormous, and overwhelmingly Japanese-language at booth level. The second is the connpass community: small evening sessions in Nihonbashi, Roppongi and Shibuya, typically free, typically thirty to a hundred and fifty people, and almost always conducted in Japanese with Japanese slides.
That language reality is the single most important thing to establish before booking anything. Connpass events are Japanese-first by default. A handful of internationally organised ones — the Linux Foundation's AGNTCon and MCPCon, AI Tinkerers Tokyo — run in English, and that is where most foreign professionals should start. Assuming an event will accommodate you because the subject matter is global is the standard expensive mistake.
Makuhari is also further than it looks: budget forty-five minutes to an hour each way from central Tokyo, and treat a free expo as a full day rather than a morning. Registration for the big shows is free but genuinely required in advance, and walk-up pricing exists to punish anyone who skipped it. On value, the community sessions are the best in Asia for the price and the corporate hackathons — Mercari's, the AI Ops Community's — are unusually practical. The most overrated is the paid international academic conference held in a Tokyo hotel: several are conference-mill operations trading on the city's name rather than on a programme worth the fee.
Why this list exists
Metis AI advises Hong Kong professionals and their teams on putting AI to work — which tools, which workflows, and which of this calendar is genuinely worth a Tuesday evening. The list is a by-product of that advisory work, kept current because clients keep asking for it.
If the harder question is what to actually do with AI inside your own role, that is a conversation rather than a conference.
What the Tokyo calendar is actually like
Two Tokyo AI scenes run in parallel and barely overlap. The first is the exhibition-hall circuit at Makuhari Messe out in Chiba — Japan IT Week, NexTech Week, AI EXPO — free to attend, enormous, and overwhelmingly Japanese-language at booth level. The second is the connpass community: small evening sessions in Nihonbashi, Roppongi and Shibuya, typically free, typically thirty to a hundred and fifty people, and almost always conducted in Japanese with Japanese slides.
That language reality is the single most important thing to establish before booking anything. Connpass events are Japanese-first by default. A handful of internationally organised ones — the Linux Foundation's AGNTCon and MCPCon, AI Tinkerers Tokyo — run in English, and that is where most foreign professionals should start. Assuming an event will accommodate you because the subject matter is global is the standard expensive mistake.
Makuhari is also further than it looks: budget forty-five minutes to an hour each way from central Tokyo, and treat a free expo as a full day rather than a morning. Registration for the big shows is free but genuinely required in advance, and walk-up pricing exists to punish anyone who skipped it. On value, the community sessions are the best in Asia for the price and the corporate hackathons — Mercari's, the AI Ops Community's — are unusually practical. The most overrated is the paid international academic conference held in a Tokyo hotel: several are conference-mill operations trading on the city's name rather than on a programme worth the fee.