Below is our recent interview with Kosuke Shirako, the Founder of SHIRO & Co.:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to SHIRO & Co.?
A: SHIRO & Co. is a company that observes changes in society and turns them into new forms of business, products, systems, and decision-making.
Rather than starting from a predefined industry or market, we begin with change itself.
That change may come from AI, climate, markets, human behavior, work, security, culture, or everyday life. We observe fragments that may initially appear unrelated, connect them, interpret what they mean, and explore what they could become.
This process is expressed through the Kosuke Protocol:
Fragment → Observation → Connection → Meaning → Form
Our goal is not simply to predict the future. It is to build a practical way of reading change before it becomes obvious.
Q: What makes SHIRO & Co. different from traditional consulting or market research firms?
A: Traditional market research usually begins with a defined market.
Consulting often begins with a defined business problem.
We can begin before either of those has been clearly defined.
We are interested in signals that do not yet fit comfortably into existing categories.
For example, climate change may initially appear to be an environmental issue. But when extreme heat reduces usable working hours, it also becomes a labor issue, a productivity issue, an infrastructure issue, and eventually a business-design issue.
Likewise, AI is not only changing software. It is changing how markets are constructed, how decisions are made, how identity is formed, and how organizations interpret reality.
Our role is to observe these connections early and turn them into something usable.
We begin with change itself.
Q: What are the highlights of your latest announcement?
A: Our latest announcement is the commercialization of the Kosuke Protocol.
The important point is that the protocol is not simply a consulting framework or an AI tool.
It is an operating process for observing, connecting, interpreting, and implementing change.
We are already applying it across a network of what we call Observatories.
For example, our Climate Observatory examines climate not only as temperature or weather, but as a question of usable human time. Extreme heat can effectively compress the working day and affect productivity, project schedules, labor systems, and regional competitiveness.
Our Entangled Society work examines second- and third-order consequences in complex social systems.
Many decisions are evaluated only by their immediate, intended effect. But interventions rarely remain contained within a single domain. A new technology can reshape labor, regulation, culture, trust, and market behavior. A policy intended to solve one problem may create entirely new incentives or vulnerabilities elsewhere.
Entangled Society is designed to observe those chains of consequence.
Rather than asking only, “Did the intervention work?”, we also ask: What changed around it? What new behavior emerged? Which systems adapted? What unintended effects appeared later?
This is important because many business opportunities and risks do not appear at the point of intervention itself. They emerge one or two steps downstream.
By making those connections visible, we can identify possibilities that conventional market analysis may miss.
Our Markets work explores how AI may increasingly participate in constructing the markets that companies believe they are observing.
We are also developing Signal to Proposal, which moves from detected signals toward concrete business proposals.
Observation is the beginning. Implementation is the destination.
Q: What can we expect from SHIRO & Co. in the next six months?
A: The next six months will be about connecting the pieces.
We already have multiple Observatories, experiments, simulations, and applications, and the connections between them are beginning to become visible.
Recent examples include “Meaning Capture”, an experiment in preserving fragments of thought before they become fully formed ideas, and then discovering how those fragments connect and accumulate into meaning.
Another is “Inhabited Internet”, which examines what remains in digital networks when a person dies, disappears, or becomes responsive again through AI. It explores the boundaries between presence, identity, archives, and machine-mediated continuity.
These projects may appear very different, but they are connected by the same underlying question: how do we observe something before its meaning becomes obvious?
The next phase is to make these relationships more systematic, so that an observation, fragment, or question in one part of the network can travel into another Observatory, simulation, business hypothesis, or proposal.
We are not building a collection of isolated projects. We are building a system in which observations can travel.
Q: What is something about SHIRO & Co. that people might not immediately realize?
A: SHIRO & Co. is not organized around a single industry, market, or permanent functional structure.
We organize around the observation, connection, and implementation required for a particular project.
When a project reaches its natural boundary, the structure can dissolve.
What remains is the Observatory Network and the Kosuke Protocol.
This allows us to move across areas that are usually treated separately — AI, climate, markets, security, culture, human behavior, and business — while still using the same underlying method.
I think the most important thing we are building is not a collection of products.
It is a way of helping organizations develop their own way of reading change.
