Pro-AIPerson

Takashi Kiryu

President of Square Enix

President of Square Enix, publisher of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Opened 2024 with a New Year’s letter pledging to be “aggressive in applying AI,” arguing generative AI could fundamentally change how the company creates its games.

Executive

A New Year’s Letter from the President (2024)

In his words

I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming.

— Square Enix, 2024

We also intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions.

— Square Enix, 2024

Biography

Takashi Kiryu (born 1975) became president of Square Enix Holdings in June 2023, succeeding Yosuke Matsuda after the latter’s decade at the top of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest publisher. A corporate strategist rather than a game creator — he joined Square Enix in 2020 to run corporate planning and became Chief Strategy Officer in 2021 — Kiryu was brought in to refocus a company whose previous leadership had chased blockchain gaming.

The New Year’s letter

Kiryu nailed his colors to the mast in his first New Year’s greeting as president, published January 1, 2024. Where Matsuda’s letters had touted NFTs, Kiryu’s named generative AI the disruptive technology of the moment and committed Square Enix to adopting it across the business — in the short term to boost development productivity and sharpen marketing, and in the long term “to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities.”

The letter drew immediate global coverage and a wary response from fans and developers, landing as it did amid industry-wide layoffs and creator anger over AI training data. Square Enix had already been experimenting publicly — its 2023 Portopia Serial Murder Case re-release tested natural-language parsing, and the studio drew criticism for AI-generated background assets in Foamstars — and under Kiryu the company has continued restructuring around fewer, bigger titles with heavier technology investment.

Kiryu’s posture is that of a turnaround executive treating AI as core infrastructure rather than experiment — a contrast with peers like Shigeru Miyamoto, who has positioned Nintendo deliberately against the AI current.