Jun Suto

Catch Jun on Do Radio: Where To Next? Mike Warwick, 2nd - 8th November 2026.

Jun Suto, Business Strategist and Founding Producer of the AI + Compassion Global Forum.

Jun Suto is a business strategist, technology producer and consultant dedicated to ensuring that compassion, not competition, guides how we build and use powerful technologies. He grew up in the 1980s in a beach town in coastal Japan, a kilometre from an ocean too polluted to swim in. When he came back a decade later he found it transformed, an early lesson that damaged places can be brought back to life. After studying statistics on early Macintosh computers, he spent thirty-eight years in California. He started out in risk consulting at KPMG Los Angeles, then founded his own consultancy, S-CUBED, advising clients from Honda and Panasonic to Hitachi and Oracle. Along the way he watched Silicon Valley founders turn to mindfulness only after a second successful exit, and found himself asking why we don’t simply start there.

In 2016, Jun’s team won XPRIZE’s Visioneers programme, a contest to design the next big XPRIZE challenge, with an idea born from a playful question: what’s the ultimate form of transport? Their answer, teleportation, became the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE. Jun went on to produce the four-year competition from its launch in 2018, as teams from around the world raced to build robotic avatars that a person could operate from anywhere on earth, seeing, feeling and acting as if physically present. As he puts it, “we cannot teleport ourselves yet, but we can teleport our skill set.” That could mean a doctor in New York treating a sick child in a remote village, or a mechanic in Los Angeles fixing the only truck a community depends on. As Covid made painfully clear, it could also mean a loved one holding a hand at a hospital bedside they could never otherwise reach.

Now back in Tokyo, Jun is the founding producer of the AI + Compassion Global Forum and a Global Ambassador for Singularity University’s Kyoto Chapter. He works to redirect money and attention toward compassionate leaders, patient capital and mission-led structures such as public benefit corporations. The forum draws on Japanese philosophy, including wa, harmony and connection, and ma, the vital pause or space between things that gives art, music and conversation their beauty. All of it serves a vision “to co-create the future where nature, humanity and AI technology will coexist and flourish.” He sees himself less as a builder of technology than as someone who lures others onto the bandwagon, trusting that once people see the possibility, they will act.

In conversation with Mike, Jun reflects on the moment he looked out through a robot’s eyes and saw his own body sitting beside him. He also talks about the energy hunger of today’s AI, a corporate culture built on scarcity rather than abundance, and an attention economy designed to hijack who we become. And he explains why, in an age of machines, one of the most radical things we can do is simply pause, be with nature and remember to feel.