Region Focus | Japan & Korea
BCG's new AI Maturity Matrix 2026 shows Japan and South Korea both advancing into the top 'AI Pioneer' tier this year, joining Canada, China, Singapore, the UK and the US, with the report naming execution speed — not ambition — as this year's dividing line; a South Korean presidential AI strategy official publicly cited China's proposed export curbs on 40 advanced technologies as the reason to accelerate a 'full-stack sovereign AI' strategy; SoftBank and Samsung Electronics connected their independently operated telecom AI agents using the Google-originated, Linux Foundation-stewarded A2A protocol (plus its telecom extension A2A-T), demonstrating cross-vendor collaboration in a stadium-congestion scenario; the same week, China tightened export controls on its top AI models, clouding the international availability of openly licensed models like Qwen and DeepSeek.