In March 2017, Koichi Hasegawa was working from a serviced office in Tokyo. UiPath’s Japanese operation had three employees, including him. He had recently been chief operating officer of Barclays’ Japanese unit. Now he was discussing an automation project with a large financial institution and the possibility of hiring at least ten people. A career spent inside international banks had arrived at a smaller meeting table.
The change of scale is the beginning of his story at UiPath. Hasegawa had seen enough expensive technology to know that installing a system did not make every awkward piece of work disappear. Somewhere between the system and the person using it, small jobs survived. Those jobs interested him enough to leave banking. By January 2017 he had joined UiPath; the Japanese subsidiary followed in February.
The work between the systems
Hasegawa’s route into software leadership began with a law degree at Keio University. He joined Arthur Andersen, now Accenture, in 1983, moved to Goldman Sachs in 1993 and Deutsche Bank in 2000, and joined Barclays in 2005. His responsibilities crossed information technology and operations. These were jobs concerned with keeping organizations working, a useful preparation for noticing precisely where they did not.
His international assignments included Chicago, New York, Singapore and Hong Kong. At Barclays, he oversaw an Asia-Pacific technology organization of about 10,000 people, with Singapore as his base, and also served as Japan COO. There is something instructive about that combination: designing the machinery of a bank and being responsible for the business that has to live with it. An elegant system is only part of the assignment.
He first heard about robotic process automation in 2005 or 2006 through offshore operations in India. The decisive encounter came in 2016, when he gained direct experience of the technology. RPA offered a way to automate remaining manual tasks around established systems. He called this the “last mile”. The phrase makes office work sound like a delivery problem, which, on a bad afternoon, it can resemble.
He could have pursued automation from within Barclays. Instead, he wanted to apply it more broadly to Japanese productivity. Years of watching foreign software struggle for acceptance in Japan had also left him wanting to try the supplier’s side of the business. He brought the experience of a large customer to the much smaller organization trying to win one.
“I had conviction in RPA as a highly disruptive, effective tool.”
Koichi Hasegawa · 2018 interview
A bank had to say yes
A relationship with Daniel Dines helped turn that intention into a business. Over dinner, Hasegawa and UiPath’s founder agreed that he would work for the company part time. Later, Hasegawa brought word that the Japanese banking group SMBC was considering UiPath for a substantial RPA program. The opening required more than a promising demonstration.
Dines flew to Tokyo and committed to investment in Japan and six employees dedicated to the effort. SMBC chose UiPath over its existing automation suppliers. When the bank’s Kei Yamamoto later discussed the decision, he emphasized the company’s attention to the customer as well as its technology. Hasegawa had helped connect an emerging software company with a demanding buyer. The small operation now had a very large test of its promises.
That episode gives his career change a practical shape. Familiarity with a customer’s world can help a new supplier understand what a commitment actually entails. The bank would have to operate what it bought. UiPath would have to support what it sold. The agreement connected two organizations with very different histories and sizes, each dependent on the other taking the work seriously.
Japan was helping write the specification
Hasegawa’s argument for Japanese automation grew more specific than a general promise of efficiency. He described workplaces full of tasks that were complicated, varied and handled in small quantities. The demands came partly from attention to service and quality. A product designed only for simple, repetitive work in large batches would miss a considerable part of that market.
He also described two obstacles to adoption. Executives could expect automation to behave like a magic wand. IT departments could remember the spreadsheet macros that became impossible to maintain after their creators moved on. Both concerns touched the same organizational difficulty: someone had to understand, support and take responsibility for the automation after the initial enthusiasm wore off. Buying software was the relatively straightforward part.
His early hiring criteria fit that experience. In 2017, he sought people who listened closely enough to understand a customer’s intentions, then delivered with conviction. He wanted an international outlook extending beyond English proficiency. Translating a global initiative into something useful for a Japanese customer required judgment about the customer as well as knowledge of the product. His own working life had supplied considerable practice in both directions.
The difficulty was visible even in the language of the job. A global software initiative had to become a local customer’s working arrangement. Hasegawa’s recruitment pitch put listening and delivery in the same description. A colleague who understood the technology but misunderstood the customer would have only part of what he was seeking. For an operation still building its team, those criteria made the customer relationship part of the hiring decision, rather than a subject to revisit once the product was installed.
Two books with people in the title
In November 2020, Hasegawa published 現場が輝くデジタルトランスフォーメーション, a book about digital transformation through RPA and AI. Its organizing concern was the workplace: who should perform the tedious jobs of entering information, moving data and checking documents? The argument opened automation to people beyond the engineering department. That was a substantial audience for a former banking CIO to address.
His second book, 現場が主役の日本型DX, appeared in October 2022. Its subtitle proposed using RPA and AI as readily as a smartphone. The book made developing the people who use technology central to transformation. Its conversations brought in figures including Deloitte’s Masaya Mori and Accenture’s Gakusei Hoshina, alongside other technology and business leaders. Hasegawa was assembling a discussion about how organizations change, rather than restricting the subject to a product manual.
There was a public-speaking version of the same interest. His September 2019 TEDxOtemachiED talk, Digital robots for everyone, explored the implications of automation for society and learning. Four years later, he returned to Keio as a guest lecturer with a title that was unusually candid about his intellectual appetite: Brimming with Curiosity. For students meeting a senior executive, it offered a rather inviting starting point.
WATCH · TEDxOTEMACHIED · 2019Digital robots for everyoneKoichi Hasegawa’s talk · 12 minutesBefore automating, find out what happens
By 2022, his attention also included process mining: using operational data to understand how work actually flows. He described the limitations of building systems through interviews alone. Each person could explain a portion of the work, while the whole process remained harder to see. An organization might be very familiar with its departments and still misunderstand the route a task took between them.
He wanted analysis to lead to changes in the work. He also resisted the idea that managers would embrace change simply because someone instructed them to. People who had succeeded using existing methods needed to understand and accept a new approach. Read together, these positions explain why his automation agenda kept returning to the people closest to the task. Their knowledge was part of the material required to improve it.
Asked in 2022 whether he preferred his former industry or his current work, he chose the present job immediately. He spoke about the satisfaction of solving customers’ problems and the appeal of technology’s pace of change. After decades in consulting and finance, he had found work that let him combine the two experiences with a visible result for someone else. The answer was refreshingly uncomplicated.
The return, and the question of trust
His responsibilities changed in February 2024. Hasegawa became chairman of UiPath Japan as Tetsuo Minami took the country manager role. He remained involved in customer and partner relationships and strategic direction. On September 1, 2025, he returned to lead the Japanese operation as chairman and CEO. Japan simultaneously became a region reporting directly to headquarters, alongside the Americas and International regions.
The return put him in charge during another transition, this time toward AI agents working with software robots and people. He emphasized reliability: flexible AI needed to be combined with tools capable of carrying out defined tasks consistently. His partner-summit message that year focused on productivity across an organization. A helpful individual assistant was one possibility; coordinating a whole business process was a different undertaking.
Conceptual explanation, not a product architecture.
By October 2026, his explanation sharpened further. AI could help understand a business environment and design workflows, with people making judgments and RPA or other tools executing the work. He highlighted the Japanese market’s complicated, low-volume tasks with multiple branches. The issue he had identified years earlier was still there, now being approached with another generation of tools.
His outside responsibilities had widened, too. He chairs the Next Generation RPA & AI Consortium and became an outside director of Digital Data Solution in November 2025. These roles extend his involvement beyond the company he helped establish in Japan. Yet the central concern remains recognizable: how useful technology makes its way into an organization and becomes something people can depend on.
Hasegawa began his UiPath chapter with three people and a conviction about overlooked work. The titles, tools and organizational chart have changed since that small Tokyo office. The last mile remains an exacting place to build a business. It is where a system finally meets a person who needs to finish the job.