As AI has permeated our lives most innovatively, the interest and investment are expected to grow further to drive the innovation engine across all sectors of society. Such large scale investments by government or private firms will create a long-appraised impact on society and its citizens. AI researches powered by such investment will help root-out the societally relevant problems to engage people in creating a more diverse workforce to better tackle the problems. The report "A 20-Year Community Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Research in the US" highlights six significant areas where AI research is likely to impact in the next 20 years. In the near term, chronic health conditions like diabetes, cancer, and heart and neurological diseases are likely to benefit most from new applications of AI, according to a survey of healthcare professionals.

NEC Corporation and the University of Tokyo recently announced the commencement of a comprehensive industry-academia alliance for strengthening innovation in Japan. This alliance differs from others in that it has been created under an organization-to-organization agreement to promote comprehensive collaboration, including the sharing of visions and issues from the fundamental research phase to the commercialization of research results phase, the consideration of social acceptance of research results, and the development of human resources for the future. Among the first actions by this industry-academia alliance for innovation will be considering the magnitude of the impact of AI on society, to conclude the NEC/University of Tokyo Partnership Agreement for Future AI Research and Education in the field of Strategic Artificial Intelligence (AI), and to commence specific activities. Conventional industry-academia alliances have only engaged in limited, small-scale joint research related to individual technologies. However, in order to strengthen Japan's innovation and promote meaningful social changes, it will be imperative to carry out investigations on implications for ethics and legal systems with a focus on commercialization, as well as to create new collaborative alliances that are large in scale and cover broad areas, including human resource development.