Your Excellency,
Ambassador Sugiyama,
Dear colleagues,

Minasama.

 

Thank you to the Japanese Embassy and NHO.

I had the privilege to lead our delegation to Tokyo in March for the Hiroshima AI Process Friends Group, and the B2B roundtable on industrial AI at the Norwegian Embassy.

Today, at Japan's initiative, we continue that conversation in Oslo. That arc matters.

In the margins of the Hiroshima Process, a Japanese colleague described the concept of Ma間.

The meaningful pause.
The space between things.
Where context happens.
Where relationships live.


I thought about AI.

Because that space, between the system and the citizen, between the algorithm and the decision is exactly where responsible AI governance sits.

Not: how fast the model is.
But: what happens in space between the machine and the human being.


In Norway, we call that space the social contract.
The idea that technology, like all power, derives its legitimacy from the people it serves.

That must happen with the people, not over their heads, not against them.


That is why we are in this room today.


…


We are facing the most serious geopolitical situation since the Second World War.

— (pause) —


That is not a politician's exaggeration.
It is the frame within which everything else is happening, including what you work on every day.

Technology policy has become industrial policy, education policy, security policy, simultaneously.

AI is not the answer alongside this reality.
It is the answer at the heart of it.

My grandfather always said: Marte, honesty lasts longest.

Nearly one in four Norwegian budget kroner now comes from the sovereign wealth fund.

The workforce that built the welfare state is shrinking.

We cannot hire our way out of this; we will not spend our way out of it.

We must deliver more, with the same people, working smarter.

Norway's AI agenda has 3 goals:
stronger productivity,
stonger competitiveness, and stronger national security.

Done right,
AI could represent 500 to 600 billion kroner in annual value creation, around 17 percent of GDP.

Real money we risk leaving on the table. If we don’t to this right.
In Norway alone.

Our goal is to become the world's best digitalised country by 2030.

Its adopted policy, not an aspiration.
 

We have put the billions to work:
- six AI research centres with industry at the table,
One with trust and AI alone.

- Olivia, our supercomputer with 17 times our previous compute capacity,
- and Norway's first national language model on its way.

- We are adopting the EU AI Act on Europe's timeline, no disadvantage for Norwegian business.

- And four weeks ago, the Data Governance Act went to Parliament. Norway's most valuable untapped asset is not oil. It is the high-quality public data locked in silos that you could be building on. That changes now.

The biggest barrier is not technology.

Not regulation.

It is competence.

The biggest barrier is competence — not technology, not regulation.

KI Norge exists to lower that threshold.
Concrete guidance.
A regulatory sandbox.
A lower bar for organisations that do not know where to start.

Our target: 80 percent of public organisations using AI this year. 100 percent by 2030.
Not as a technology target.

As a service target.

The nurse who sees the patient not the screen.
The small business that gets an answer from the public agency the same day, not three months later.

But policy does not implement itself. The distinction that matters is not who adopts AI, it is who treats it as a change project, not a technology project.
Anchored at the top. Understood in the middle. Taken up by the people who do the work. That requires leadership.

Because trust, not oil, not capital, is our deepest competitive advantage.

But it is under pressure.

Both our countries are seeing more sophisticated digital fraud, more advanced manipulation, new forms of attack targeting individuals and the structures of society.

That is not just a technology problem. It is a security problem.

Fighting back is a shared priority — and one where Norway and Japan are already aligning.


We put that trust at risk the moment AI happens over people's heads instead of with them.

When that space fills with decisions no one can explain and consequences no one owns.

Privacy and trust are the precondition. By design. Not an afterthought.

…


Norway and Japan are among the world's great maritime nations;
We have sailed the same waters for generations.

We face many of the same structural pressures:
- ageing populations,
- workforce constraints,
- the need to produce more from what we have.

Both countries know the answer is not to work more. It is to work smarter.

And our strengths are complementary in ways that are genuinely rare.

Japan: world-leading robotics, precision medicine, and decades of applying technology in an ageing society.
Norway: world-leading maritime technology, clean energy, and some of the highest-quality sectoral data anywhere, in health, ocean operations, and energy systems

Japanese precision and industrial scale.

Norwegian domain expertise and data depth.

Together: industrial AI that raises productivity and is safe to trust. We have barely started.

In health: Norway's registries and regulatory sandbox for real-world testing.

Japan's diagnostics capability and care robotics.

In maritime: same oceans, same decarbonization pressure, the same AI systems emerging for navigation, maintenance and safety.

Kongsberg, DNV with Japanese counterparts are already talking.

We need pilots now.
Shared data frameworks.
Joint research.


I want to commend Japan's leadership through the Hiroshima AI Process.

Building shared principles without imposing a single regulatory model, a framework others can connect to, not compete with, is genuinely hard.

It requires the willingness to lead without dominating.

In a fragmenting world, that is exactly the kind of leadership that matters.

Norway's Data Protection Authority runs a regulatory AI sandbox.

Japan's Institute for AI Safety Advancement, Dr. Okiyama is here today, is doing pioneering governance work.

These two efforts should speak to each other formally, not just informally.

That is a concrete step this partnership can take.


Responsible AI is not just an ethical requirement.

It is our competitive advantage.

Predictable frameworks are not brakes on innovation.
Trust is infrastructure.

Close

The Crown Prince visits Japan in June.

This roundtable is not a warmup.

What we develop in this room today becomes the substance of that visit, concrete, not ceremonial.

Dear all,

Technology changes fundamentally how we build our societies.

But not why we build them.

And not for whom.


In Norway we say: let the machines do more of what they are good at, so that people can do more of what only people can do.

Japan understands this.
Not through the same history or the same institutions.

But through the same instinct: That relationship is not incidental to technology. It is the point.


That ma, the space between, is not a gap to be filled with data and speed. It is where we decide what kind of society we are building.

The countries most likely to get AI right are not the biggest or the fastest. They are the ones with the highest trust between government, industry and citizens, and honesty to say out loud what they do not yet know.

Norway and Japan are those countries.


I look forward to hearing from every one of you.

Thank you. Arigatou gozaimasu.