UPWARD Turns Field Sales Data Into AI-Powered Customer Intelligence
JAPANDIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONASIA-PACIFICJAPAN
How UPWARD Uses AI to Transform Field Sales and Customer Relationships
As AI automates more sales processes, face-to-face relationships remain a powerful differentiator. UPWARD is combining mobile technology, location data and AI to help field sales teams reduce administrative work, capture customer insights and turn everyday interactions into valuable corporate data.
RYUSUKE KANEKI | PRESIDENT OF UPWARD
UPWARD is a Tokyo-based technology company specializing in AI-powered tools for field sales. Established in 2016, the company develops a mobile AI agent that automatically captures customer visits and other frontline activity, integrates that information with CRM systems and helps organizations use field data to guide sales decisions. UPWARD says its platform has been adopted by approximately 450 companies, including major Japanese corporations, and supports integration with various platforms, including Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Japan is currently undergoing a significant corporate transformation as several structural pressures converge. The Tokyo Stock Exchange is pushing listed companies to improve profitability, while the country’s labor shortage is forcing businesses to generate greater productivity from their existing headcount. At the same time, DX related spending is expected to reach approximately ¥6 trillion to ¥7 trillion by 2028, and sales is one of the areas where this transformation could have the greatest impact because it has traditionally been highly dependent on human resources. From your perspective, how far has Japan actually progressed in its DX transformation? Beyond the initial transition from paper based processes toward cloud platforms, CRM, ERP, AI and automation, what fundamental changes are taking place, and how do you expect them to reshape industries such as financial services, insurance, manufacturing and services?
Japan’s DX transformation is certainly progressing, but I think it is important to understand where that progress is actually taking place and how deeply digitalization has penetrated companies.
At the moment, the transformation is being driven primarily by large enterprises. Major corporations are increasingly introducing cloud based systems and standardized enterprise platforms, including CRM and ERP solutions. For large organizations, introducing these types of standardized systems is generally easier because they have the scale, resources and organizational structures required to implement them across their businesses.
AI and automation are also becoming increasingly common. Companies are beginning to integrate these technologies into their existing systems and workflows, and we are seeing more efforts to use data and digital tools to improve efficiency.
However, I would not say that Japan has already completed its DX transformation. In many organizations, what we are seeing today is still partial digitalization. Paper documents may become digital, certain administrative processes may become paperless, or one particular workflow may be automated, but that does not necessarily mean the entire company has been transformed.
So there is clearly acceleration, but the transformation is happening step by step. There remains considerable room for DX to penetrate more deeply into the actual day to day operations of employees.
This is particularly important in functions such as sales. If digital technology, CRM, AI and automation can reduce the amount of manual administrative work employees perform, companies can make better use of their existing people. Rather than spending time entering information or completing repetitive processes, employees can concentrate more of their time on activities that actually create value.
That is where I believe DX can have an increasingly significant impact across financial services, insurance, manufacturing and other service industries.
One consequence of this transformation among large enterprises is the creation of an increasingly important ecosystem of startups and SMEs that support corporate digitalization. At the same time, the Japanese government has established ambitious startup development targets, including the creation of 100 unicorns and 100,000 startups by 2027, alongside a target of approximately ¥10 trillion. Reaching that scale through the Japanese market alone appears difficult, meaning technology companies increasingly need to consider overseas expansion as part of their growth strategy. UPWARD already has an office in Bangkok and you have spoken about Southeast Asia, India, Africa and Europe as potential markets. How are you balancing the opportunities that remain in Japan with your international ambitions, and what proportion of UPWARD’s future growth do you ultimately expect to come from overseas?
I agree that achieving that kind of growth through Japan alone would be very difficult. Digitalization is progressing among startups and small and medium sized enterprises, and the government is making changes and introducing initiatives to encourage that development, but the domestic market alone has limitations.
For UPWARD, international expansion is therefore an important part of our long term strategy.
We already have an office in Bangkok, Thailand, and our sales there have been increasing. Southeast Asia is currently one of the areas where we see significant potential, and we want to continue building our presence there.
However, our ambition is not limited to Southeast Asia. We have a B2B business application that we believe can be developed globally, and we want to increasingly use a PLG approach so that the product can reach customers through online channels rather than requiring a traditional sales structure in every individual market.
That creates the possibility of reaching markets such as India, Africa and Europe as well.
Over the longer term, our objective is for international business to represent approximately 30 to 40 percent of our sales. We ultimately want to build a company capable of generating more than ¥100 billion in sales, and international markets will need to play an important role if we are going to reach that scale.
There are obviously differences between markets. Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States have different working cultures and different levels of infrastructure development.
But when we look specifically at field sales, we find that many of the fundamental use cases are surprisingly similar. Wherever there is a physical touchpoint between a salesperson and a customer, companies need to understand what happened during that interaction, manage the activity and capture the resulting information.
That gives us confidence that a field sales application can be adapted internationally.
That international opportunity is particularly interesting because the digital environment differs considerably from one region to another. Japan is still moving many companies from paper based processes toward digital applications and automation, while in Southeast Asia many users effectively entered the digital economy through smartphones rather than PCs. Europe presents another environment again, and the United States has a vast geography where location based tools can be particularly relevant. Yet you have argued that the underlying workflow of field sales remains remarkably similar across countries because physical customer touchpoints still need to be managed. What aspects of UPWARD do you believe are genuinely universal across markets, and where do you expect the product or user experience to require localization?
The working styles in Japan, Europe, Southeast Asia and the United States can be very different, but the fundamental activities involved in field sales are often much more similar than people might expect.
If a salesperson physically visits a customer, the company still needs to understand that activity. It needs to know that the customer was visited, when the interaction occurred, how that activity relates to the account and what should happen afterward.
Those basic requirements exist regardless of the country.
There can certainly be differences in how the information is collected or how companies want to manage it.
The infrastructure and business culture can also differ substantially.
But the underlying workflow associated with physical customer touchpoints is relatively universal. In that sense, I believe field sales applications can sometimes have greater international consistency than conventional PC based web applications, where the workflows may vary more significantly between organizations and countries.
Southeast Asia is particularly interesting because mobile technology has developed differently there. Many people did not grow up using PCs as their primary digital device. Their experience with digital technology began much more directly with smartphones.
That creates a very different starting point and makes mobile and native applications particularly relevant.
UPWARD was built around the idea of supporting people who are actually working outside the office, so that mobile environment fits naturally with what we are trying to accomplish.
The sales technology market itself is also changing rapidly. Sales engagement platforms were expected to represent approximately US$11 billion in 2025 and grow at around 16 percent CAGR through 2033, partly because salespeople traditionally lose significant productive time to reporting and other administrative work. At the same time, COVID accelerated online meetings and demonstrated that many transactions can be handled remotely. Yet certain products, particularly specialized or technically differentiated products, still depend heavily on direct customer interaction. As online selling and AI become increasingly capable, how do you expect the role of field sales to change, and why do you believe physical interaction will continue to matter?
There are definitely products and services that can be sold completely online. If the product is suitable for that environment, companies can communicate with customers digitally, conduct meetings online and potentially complete the entire transaction without meeting face to face.
But that does not apply equally to every product.
When you are selling something specialized, or when you have a product that needs to be differentiated from competing products, physically meeting the customer can still create considerable value.
A salesperson can explain why the product is different, understand the customer’s situation more directly and communicate aspects of the offering that may be difficult to convey entirely through an online meeting.
Going to the customer in person can also contribute to customer satisfaction. So I do not think the future is simply online versus offline. The appropriate approach depends on the product, the industry and the customer.
There is also a very important human element.
Imagine that two companies are offering essentially the same product, with similar specifications and similar delivery conditions. If the customer cannot make the decision based entirely on the product, the salesperson can become an important differentiating factor.
The customer may choose the salesperson who visits regularly, who demonstrates enthusiasm, who understands the customer’s circumstances and who builds a relationship over time.
In those situations, what differentiates the companies is not necessarily the technical specification of the product. It can be the human interaction surrounding it.
Today, AI is advancing extremely quickly and can perform more knowledge based tasks than before. But that can actually make the human part of the interaction more important.
Companies still need people who can create relationships and communicate directly with customers. At the same time, because of labor shortages, they cannot necessarily hire unlimited numbers of excellent salespeople.
The challenge is therefore to use technology so that a smaller number of good field salespeople can manage more high quality customer relationships. That is one of the areas where we believe UPWARD creates value.
This brings us to UPWARD’s core proposition. Your platform supports digital sales processes, but its strongest differentiation is in the physical last mile, where salespeople repeatedly visit customers and where much of the information generated during those interactions has historically remained with the individual salesperson. You work with major organizations with large workforces and substantial customer networks. What specifically convinced these types of enterprises to adopt UPWARD, and how does the platform convert everyday field activity into useful CRM data and ultimately into a corporate asset?
There are two important elements, and automation is one of the most important.
Field salespeople are focused primarily on meeting customers. They are not necessarily highly experienced with complicated IT systems, and when they are working outside the office, they do not have time to perform many different operations simply to report what they have done.
That is why we have tried to make UPWARD extremely simple from the user’s perspective.
In many cases, the salesperson only needs one or two taps. Much of the remaining process is automated.
For example, when a salesperson visits a customer, the activity can be connected to the CRM through an automatic check-in process, triggered upon the salesperson’s final submission. The system can automatically fill in basic meeting details, such as the customer visited, meeting time, and duration.
Instead of requiring the salesperson to return to the office and manually reconstruct everything that happened, the activity is captured and stored much more directly.
That is important for the salesperson because it reduces administrative work, but it is equally important for the company.
Historically, a considerable amount of information about customer relationships could remain with individual salespeople. When those activities are captured in the CRM in real time, the information becomes part of the company’s accumulated customer data.
In other words, the activity itself becomes a corporate asset.
Once that data exists, it can also be used for much more than reporting. AI can analyze the information and help the salesperson determine what to do next.
For example, if the salesperson is going to a particular geographic area, the system can use accumulated data to recommend which customers may be appropriate to visit. Those recommendations can then be presented through an AI based mapping system.
So there is a progression. First, we reduce the burden of recording field activity. Second, that activity becomes structured CRM data. Third, the company can use that data to improve future sales activity.
That combination of simplicity for the frontline employee and valuable data for the organization is one of the major reasons large enterprises appreciate the platform.
Until recently, much of AI’s contribution to sales could be described as relatively passive, helping employees record information, summarize activity or automate administrative work. The next stage appears much more proactive, with AI potentially advising salespeople about whom to visit, what product to recommend, when to approach a customer or even how to optimize an individual sales strategy. UPWARD is already developing new AI capabilities and has referred to combining external AI services, its own AI libraries, personalized activity data and Edge AI. How far do you intend to move from simple sales support toward an AI system that actively participates in the decision making process, and what is the timeline for bringing those capabilities into the platform?
That is definitely part of the direction we are pursuing.
We are working with different types of AI technology rather than depending on only one approach. We can use external AI services, and at the same time we have our own open
The important point is how those technologies can be combined with the actual activity data generated by salespeople.
If we understand what activities have taken place and what has happened with customers, we can begin creating recommendations that are individually optimized rather than simply providing the same generic recommendation to everyone.
That personalization is important because every salesperson, customer and territory is different.
We are also considering how information generated directly in the field can contribute to this process. That is where Edge AI becomes particularly interesting.
Rather than relying exclusively on information processed somewhere centrally, we can think about how data coming from the actual physical environment can contribute to recommendations and decision making.
Our roadmap is moving in that direction.
At the moment, we are carrying out the fundamental research necessary to develop these capabilities. Based on our current development plans, we expect to be able to release these functions within approximately a year.
The speed of development itself has also changed dramatically because of AI.
Our development team is using AI, which allows us to work much faster than before. Open toward very specific objectives and accelerate the process of creating new products and functions
Everything in this industry is evolving very quickly, but that rapid evolution also gives a company like ours the ability to develop and test new ideas much faster.
That need for speed appears to be one of the reasons you established the UPWARD Sales AI Innovation Lab in Kyobashi in April 2025. You have been developing technologies around areas such as voice, scanning and AI while simultaneously looking to recruit additional technical talent. Rather than operating as a conventional research center separated from the commercial organization, you have described the lab as a way of shortening the feedback loop between field users, sales teams and engineers. Why is that direct connection between frontline experience and R&D so important, and could the technologies being developed there eventually take UPWARD beyond its current field sales application?
The main objective is to make the feedback loop much faster.
Our business teams and sales teams are interacting directly with customers and with the people who actually use the product in the field. Those users can tell us what works, what creates difficulties and what they actually need when they are meeting customers.
We can bring that information directly into the development process and have the business, sales and technology teams collaborate around it.
That allows us to take feedback from the field and turn it into product improvements much more rapidly.
The fact that we work directly with field salespeople is particularly valuable. Their voices can become part of the development process rather than technology being designed only from the perspective of engineers.
That speed is important for us, especially in an environment where AI technology itself is changing so quickly.
We are currently concentrating primarily on the field sales market, but there are different ways we can expand from there.
One approach is to create packages for specific industries. Financial services, housing and equipment are examples where the underlying technology can be adapted to the particular workflows of an industry.
Another direction is field service.
The workflow of a technician is not exactly the same as that of a salesperson, so some of the components and the user experience would need to change. But the fundamental concept is similar because both users are working physically in the field.
For example, someone may visit a site, scan information or documents, connect that information with an ERP system, prepare an estimate and potentially complete part of the process while still with the customer.
That is different from conventional sales, but many of the technologies we have already developed can be applied to that environment.
Manufacturing appears particularly relevant to that expansion. During our discussion you identified agricultural machinery, automobiles, construction machinery, refrigeration equipment and kitchen equipment as areas where field sales and maintenance activities can potentially benefit from the same underlying technology. As you expand from field sales into field service and technician support, which industries offer the strongest opportunity, and how do you see the same mobile, AI and ERP connected technologies being adapted to maintenance operations?
When we look at machinery related businesses, there are many situations where people need to work directly at the customer’s location.
Agricultural machinery is one example. We also see potential in automobiles, construction machinery, refrigeration equipment, kitchens and other types of machinery and equipment.
These are industries where the relationship with the customer does not necessarily end when the product is sold. There can be ongoing maintenance, service and other activities that require employees or technicians to go into the field.
That creates an opportunity to apply some of the same principles we have developed for field sales.
The exact workflow will obviously be different. A technician may need different information from a salesperson, and the application may need to interact differently with ERP systems, documents or equipment.
But the fundamental objective remains similar. We want technology to support the person who is physically working at the customer location and reduce the unnecessary administrative work surrounding that activity.
We believe our existing technology and experience can be extended naturally from sales into maintenance and field service.
UPWARD’s own history is closely connected to this idea of using technology to liberate people working outside the office. The company did not begin as the SaaS business it is today, but grew out of GIS and system integration work involving location and geolocation technologies. When you became CEO in 2016, smartphones were becoming increasingly important business tools in Japan, while GPS, satellite systems and mobile technology were effectively democratizing access to location information. How did that technological shift change your vision for the company, and why did you decide that the real opportunity was not simply location technology itself, but using it to free field workers from reporting and allow them to concentrate on customers?
The company did not originally begin as the business it is today.
Initially, it worked with GIS systems and system integration. We were involved with location and geolocation technology and worked together with companies specializing in geographic technology.
In 2016, we moved toward the SaaS business model, and that was also when I became CEO.
At that time, smartphones were beginning to be used much more extensively for business in Japan, and I saw enormous potential in location information.
Japan already had satellite systems, GPS technology and increasingly capable mobile phones. What was happening was something I think of as the democratization of location information.
Technology that had once been relatively specialized was becoming available directly through devices that ordinary employees carried with them every day.
The question for us was what we could do with that change.
One of the problems I saw was that field workers were spending too much time reporting what they had done. They would go out, meet customers and then still have to return to the company and complete administrative reporting.
That meant the technology and processes surrounding their work were actually taking time away from the customer.
We wanted to reverse that.
Our idea was to use location and mobile technology to automate as much of that reporting process as possible so that people in the field could concentrate on what they were actually there to do.
For salespeople, that means meeting customers, understanding them and creating relationships.
That idea became one of the foundations of UPWARD. Technology should not simply create another task for field workers. It should remove unnecessary work and allow them to concentrate on the activities where people create the greatest value.
Salesforce is particularly interesting in UPWARD’s story because it has been both an important partner and an investor, yet Salesforce itself operates one of the world’s largest sales technology platforms. The same is true of companies such as Microsoft, which have enormous resources and can increasingly integrate AI directly into their own CRM ecosystems. In an environment where AI development is moving so quickly that a company can identify a market need and scale within months, how do you make sure UPWARD remains differentiated without trying to compete directly against the global platforms on which it can also depend? Where is the niche that large platform companies are structurally less able or less willing to address?
We need to concentrate on the areas where larger enterprise technology companies cannot necessarily go as deeply.
If we try to compete by providing exactly the same type of broad platform, that would obviously be very difficult. These companies have enormous resources and products that are designed to serve customers across many different countries and industries.
Our opportunity is to specialize.
We can focus on niche areas and workflows that require a much deeper understanding of what actually happens in the field.
One example is applications that interact directly with devices. Another is the entire offline environment surrounding field sales and field workers.
Global platform companies generally need to provide standardized interfaces and functionality that can be used internationally. That naturally limits how deeply they can specialize in every individual frontline workflow.
We can go much further into those specialized requirements.
That is why we want to continue focusing on the offline market and particularly on field sales.
We do not necessarily need to replace the CRM.
The underlying CRM can remain in place.
What we want to provide is the frontline application that makes that CRM useful to the person who is actually outside the office meeting customers.
That is an important distinction.
The field worker should not have to think about complicated CRM operations. UPWARD can provide the simple front end experience, automate the collection of activity data and then connect that information back into the enterprise system.
That specialized position allows us to complement larger platforms rather than simply trying to reproduce them.
International expansion is the other major pillar of that strategy. You already operate in Bangkok and have developed relationships in Thailand, while Southeast Asia has a particularly interesting mobile first profile because many users entered the digital economy through smartphones rather than desktop computers. You have identified Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia as potential growth markets, while your longer term ambitions also extend to Africa and Europe. At the same time, you do not want to depend on building a traditional partner network in every country and instead want a product that can increasingly sell itself through a product led model. What is the practical roadmap for international expansion, and how large do you ultimately want overseas business to become?
Our immediate focus internationally is Southeast Asia, and Thailand is particularly important.
As you mentioned, the way people adopted technology in Southeast Asia is different from Japan.
Many people did not begin with PCs and then move toward smartphones. For many users, the smartphone was effectively their first major computing device.
That is a significant difference because it means mobile applications and native applications are already a very natural part of how people work and interact with technology.
For UPWARD, that creates an interesting opportunity because our business has always been centered on supporting people who work outside the office.
Our initial ambition is for Southeast Asian sales to reach a level equivalent to approximately 10 percent of our Japanese sales.
Thailand and Bangkok are important starting points, and we are also looking at markets such as Malaysia, Indonesia and India.
However, our long term international strategy is broader.
One of our priorities is to create a product led model where the product can increasingly sell itself.
If a B2B application can be discovered, adopted and used through online channels, it becomes possible to reach international customers without recreating the same traditional sales infrastructure in every market.
That does not mean partnerships are unimportant.
We can still work with large trading companies, IT resellers and other organizations where those relationships create value.
But the broader objective is to build a product that has the ability to expand internationally on its own merits.
Over time, we want to move beyond Southeast Asia into markets such as India, Africa and Europe.
Ultimately, our ambition is for international business to account for approximately 30 to 40 percent of total sales.
Looking ahead, perhaps the most important strategic question is what UPWARD ultimately wants to become. You have now spent approximately a decade leading the company through its transition from GIS and system integration toward mobile SaaS, field sales DX and now AI. At the same time, AI is changing the economics of expertise itself. Knowledge that was once scarce can increasingly be generated or accessed instantly, yet direct interaction between experts, salespeople and customers remains valuable and may even become more important. You have said that companies cannot simply hire unlimited numbers of excellent field salespeople, meaning technology must enable a smaller number of people to serve customers at a higher level. Over the next three years, what category do you want UPWARD to lead globally, what role should AI play in increasing rather than replacing human value, and if you had to communicate UPWARD’s mission to an international audience of technology decision makers, executives and leaders managing multinational field operations in one sentence, what would it be?
I want UPWARD to become the global category leader for applications supporting field workers.
That is the ambition I continue to communicate to our employees. We want to become number one in this category, particularly in field sales.
AI is evolving incredibly quickly, and there are many things it can already do that previously required people.
But I do not believe that means the role of people disappears.
There are still areas where human beings create value that technology cannot fully reproduce, and direct interaction with customers is one of those areas.
What we want to do is use AI and DX to support that human capability.
The objective is not simply to automate everything or remove people from sales. It is to automate the parts of the work that technology can handle so that people can concentrate on the parts where they create the greatest value.
That is becoming particularly important because companies cannot always hire enough excellent field salespeople.
If you have a limited number of very capable people, technology needs to help those people manage more high quality customer relationships.
That is where I believe the demand for UPWARD is increasing.
The more AI advances, the more important it becomes to identify what humans should continue doing.
In field sales, relationships, enthusiasm, understanding the customer and knowing how to approach someone at the right moment remain extremely important.
We want AI to support those abilities rather than replace them.
Ultimately, our ambition is to become the frontline application for field workers globally and to create an environment where technology enables people to concentrate on meaningful customer interaction.
If I had to express that mission in one concise statement, it would be:
“Innovation of the last mile”
The last mile is where technology reaches the actual field and where digital capabilities connect with human activity.
For us, that means bringing AX into the last mile in a way that increases human value while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction.
That is what we want UPWARD to achieve.
For more information, visit their website at: https://upward.jp
