Development Revolution Powered by Silicon Valley Technology: Behind the Scenes of Replit’s Adoption

At SMFL’s Digital Lab, where I serve as Director, we focus on development of new digital services. One of our key challenges was how to visualize and share “tacit knowledge” about social and business issues. Simply explaining requirements verbally or writing them often loses subtle nuances, that causes engineers to create something different from what was originally intended. As a result, the engineers often struggle for back and forth, siloed development, and repetitive discussions with user departments—creating inefficiencies.

Even if user departments had some shape specifications, the lack of visibility into tacit knowledge made it difficult to understand and share the final vision of the product. Our goal with Replit’s adoption was to bridge that gap through dynamic prototyping.

At the time Fujiwara consulted me, “Vibe Coding”—the automation of coding using generative AI—gets attention in Silicon Valley. I believed that leveraging such innovative solutions could address the challenges Fujiwara faced, so I immediately started sourcing startups. That’s when we discovered Replit. Replit targets non-engineers and business users to build applications in Japanese or English, offering a highly autonomous development experience so that users don’t have to write any codes. When I first tried Replit, I was amazed: by only entering just a few lines of Japanese, it generated a fully functional, beautifully designed app in minutes.

Additionally, Replit’s founder Amjad Masad is a well-known figure in Silicon Valley. Through the goodwill of a venture capital in the region, I was able to connect with him and arranged a meeting with SMFL.

Replit is designed to democratize development, allowing anyone to turn their ideas into applications without specialized programming skills. It is currently used by more than 40 million users worldwide, and the number of active users in Japan has been increasing rapidly in recent years. Given this background, interest in the Japanese market was growing. The communication from the SMBC Group was very timely.

When I actually saw Replit’s technology, I felt, “This is not just a generative AI editor.” There have been many vendors that only focused on design of applications, but what makes Replit unique is its ability to build not only the front-end but also the back-end logic and database in a highly sophisticated way—simply by giving a few instructions in Japanese like, “Create this screen and connect it to this database on the back end.” Also, you can continue refining the initial prototype in Japanese as well, which means even if requirements change during development, you can flexibly modify the application which you are creating.

Furthermore, I realized that making tacit knowledge visible is highly effective for what is often called “organizational learning.” When generative AI enables rapid prototyping, development becomes more reproducible, allowing anyone to recreate the same application by referring to the past prototypes and prompts. Past prototypes—no matter if they were successful or failed—are accumulated in teams and shared among engineers, creating a foundation for collective learning. One of the key reasons we value Replit is its ability to convert individual and tacit knowledge into explicit and shareable insights that strengthen development expertise across the organization.

For years, corporations have been restricted on growth by engineering talent. There are millions of knowledge workers who know their products, customers, and problems better than any engineer or developer shop can, but they cannot build tools or prototypes to address them because of limited engineering capacity. Replit is solving this. Hundreds of enterprises are using Replit to build efficient tools and new products on their own by non-engineers. Building these applications safely and at scale is super important. For security, we have strengthened authentication and access privileges for corporate clients, and established dedicated accounts and support systems. For scale, we work very closely with our Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure partners, building entirely on these hyperscalers. SMFL is the first customer in Japan to sign up for an enterprise account. Especially in the enterprise, both customizability and security are required, so I was glad that SMFL appreciated this point.

During the PoC phase with Replit, we developed applications such as attendance management and project management tools, as well as business apps integrated with generative AI features. Our team was impressed by how fast and simple we could turn ideas into active applications.

A few months after implementation, the quality of our development process has clearly changed. Requirements definition that needed multiple meetings between engineers and design teams in the past can now be done by a single person, turning requirements into prototypes quickly and share them with teams.

Based on that successful implementation at SMFL, our next step as the Lab is not only to further promote Replit across our group but also to leverage its technology to turn our customers’ DX needs into concrete solutions. We are already seeing interest from some group companies. For example, JSOL has started using Replit for new product development, validating UI/UX, driving operational transformation, and even for internal AI business development programs.

In addition, we invited Replit to Japan in the last December and hosted a vibe coding experience event for corporate clients. This allowed participants to try Replit in a secure environment and experienced how Replit can transform their vague ideas into concrete applications.

Aiming to be a development agent that corporate customers can use with confidence, our company is striving to enhance its functions at a dizzying pace. Through this collaboration, I am convinced that there is great potential for collaboration with large Japanese companies. We also plan to enter the Japanese market in earnest. Based on these examples, we hope to promote co-creation with as many Japanese companies as possible.

Silicon Valley is one of the best places to meet startups with cutting-edge technology and great UX. Partnering with them can be a source of competitive advantage for Japanese companies. The Lab’s own value is to build deep relationships with local startups and arrange collaborations aligned with our digital strategies. We will continue to serve as a bridge between SMBC Group and innovative partners.

Through collaboration with startups, we’ve truly experienced how dramatically we can change freedom and speed of developments. We aim to scale this success across more projects. The ability to instantly turn ideas into reality by agentic AI is, in our view, a catalyst that will fundamentally transform the way we approach digital innovation. Ideas that never realize have no value. Replit’s ability to pave the way for ideas to become tangible solutions is, we believe, immensely valuable.

We will continue to evolve to meet more diverse use cases. I look forward to creating new development experiences with Japanese companies.