Silicon Valley has a story it tells about itself: move fast, ship early, fail fast, learn faster. The narrative has produced extraordinary companies, and it’s also, increasingly, a blind spot the size of a research lab.
Kazu Gomi has spent more than thirty years inside one of the world’s largest technology organizations. As president and CEO of NTT Research – the Silicon Valley-based fundamental research arm of Japanese telecom giant NTT – he occupies a position that is almost structurally at odds with the Valley’s default operating mode.
His lab doesn’t ship products on six-month cycles; its researchers don’t have quarterly targets, and some of what they’re working on won’t be relevant for a decade.
That makes him a useful critic. And at the “Research to Reality” Upgrade 2026 conference in San Jose, California, he was willing to be one.
The speed problem nobody is talking about
The thing that Gomi keeps coming back to isn’t funding or talent or compute; it’s diligence – the kind that only time makes possible.
“Research to Reality used to take ten years, twenty years. That was the norm,” he told Techloy. “But now, when it comes to AI, that is shortened so much. Research to Reality is maybe six months, even.” He paused. “I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I probably would say it’s a good thing. But there’s a scary part.”
