A bounded governance instrument that helps organisations surface repeated communication asymmetries before they harden into late-stage people incidents.
Kashi is privacy-bounded meeting governance and accountability infrastructure. A bounded review-support system for surfacing repeated interaction asymmetry in supported meeting contexts. Structural-first by default on the employer-facing lane; semantic-support detectors exist but are disabled by default, require tenant opt-in, and surface only to the affected individual or a neutral reviewer under audit.
Kashi 可視 — governance infrastructure for workplace power dynamics. Making the invisible visible. 見えないものを、見えるように。
Earlier pitches led with “¥7.9M per leave case.” That's tail risk, not base case. The defensible story is the four-bucket hidden-loss portfolio — and the A×C×I×E discount that separates “total pool” from “what Kashi realistically captures.”
| Bucket | What it captures | Evidence anchor |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Presenteeism (biggest) | Underperformance while at desk; invisible on headcount dashboards | Yokohama CU 2025: ¥7.3T of ¥7.6T |
| 2. Regrettable attrition | Manager-driven departures; replacement costs 200% of salary | Gallup: managers = 70% of engagement variance |
| 3. Formal-escalation premium | Legal fees, time-in-HR, reputation when informal → formal | Acas: 3× formal vs informal cost |
| 4. Leave-case tail | Visible end-stage: 傷病手当 claims, backfill, recruiting | METI 2025: ¥7.9M/case (tail, not base) |
The key insight: leave-cost alone isn't the sell. The sell is the portfolio — presenteeism + attrition + escalation premium are 4–8× larger than the leave tail.
15×60×30×20% → 0.54% reduction = ¥0.69M/yr
40×80×50×30% → 4.80% reduction = ¥6.10M/yr
2.0× suicide-ideation, 2.67× suicidal-behavior odds (Leach 2023, Lancet Public Health). Laissez-faire managers produce 4.3× パワハラ and 2.6× mental-health problems at 6mo (Japanese occupational-health research, 2023).
The person under pressure must recognize it, prove it, and raise it, alone. Power asymmetry makes all three hard. Gaslighting makes them doubt perception.
Each moment can be explained away. The harm is in the pattern. Organizations only see isolated complaints, never the structure.
HR sees attrition, leave, 自殺. By then the damage is done. By the time the metric moves, the bill has arrived.
Existing tools are sold to HR alone. A workplace-AI deployment that survives scrutiny requires executive sponsor + legal review + worker-representation alignment before launch. All three, or none.
Archaic's ハラスメントチェックAI reads content and sells to HR alone.
FRONTEO KIBIT Eye, deployed at MUFG and Aeon, has gone quiet.
Content classifiers miss 70%+ of Japanese cases because パワハラ is 遠回し.
Five empirically-backed structural signals. Each deterministic. Each explainable. Each maps to MHLW パワハラ 類型 3 (isolation) or 類型 5 (cold shoulder) — the transcript-visible harassment types.
| Signal | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Intrusive-interruption asymmetry | Anderson & Leaper 1998 · meta-analysis 43 studies · d=0.33 · status beats gender |
| Speaking-time / floor-share inequality | Schmid Mast 2002 · Human Communication Research · dominance correlation |
| Signal | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Topic-credit exclusion (ignored → taken over) | Sacks / Schegloff / Jefferson 1974 · foundational conversation analysis |
| Chilling delta (post-trigger participation drop) | Morrison 2014 · organizational silence · Detert & Burris 2007 |
| Response-latency asymmetry | Stivers et al. 2009 PNAS · delayed response = dispreference cross-linguistically |
| Keigo (敬語) peer-addressee asymmetry (JP-specific) | Cook 2011 · Saito 2011 · Pizziconi · Ide wakimae framework |
False-positive mitigation: every signal calibrated against each speaker's own 90-day baseline, not the team average. Defeats introversion, chair-role, L2, neurodivergence confounds.
Six frames. Same meeting. Structural signals → keigo classifier → 63-day pattern → three different views for three different roles. Real data, no mocks, no voiceover — you drive it live in front of the room.
One 47-minute product-review meeting. Kimura cuts Nao mid-word at 00:01:05 (200ms overlap). Layer 1 extracts 1 interruption, chilling delta −93%, Gini 0.34. Layer 2b (keigo) classifier: Kimura scores 0.38 toward Nao, 0.88 toward Nakamura. 0.50 asymmetry gap. Same speaker, same meeting.
Zoom out: this is not one meeting. Nao's speaking share dropped 19% → 6% sustained over 63 days. Kimura's interruptions toward her 4.7× higher than toward peers. Persistence + directionality + sustained drop = review-worthy event fires at Layer 5.
Three windows side-by-side. Nao sees a private, observational pattern page. Kimura sees his own Manager Mirror with one concrete action. CEO sees the Executive Brief: Kimura flagged, ¥3–8M modeled impact. Three framings, one data source, RBAC-separated.
m-product-w12 · 2026-04-15 · 89 turns · 5 participants. No abstractions. No “it would look like this.” Real.
Manager Mirror is a bounded developmental lane inside a broader accountability system. Private self-correction first. If the pattern persists, it escalates. That is the anti-laundering rule: Kashi is not a device for saying “we told him” and doing nothing.
Manager sees their own pattern in Manager Mirror. Private, weekly, observational language, paired with feedforward commitments ("next 2 meetings, wait for sentence completion before redirecting"). ~80% of cases resolve here if the manager is coachable.
If the pattern persists after the protected self-correction window, it leaves the developmental lane. Moves to a documented remediation process with timeline, check-ins, and structured support. Not HR punishment. Not silent.
Only if Lane B fails. Strict entitlement rules, audit logging, and employee notice required. The organization can no longer plausibly claim it didn't know. The tool does not adjudicate — humans do, under process.
The six questions every CEO or board asks before signing off.
Before launch: executive sponsor + legal review + worker-rep alignment, all three documented. Every deployment ships with a labor-consultation packet (purpose statement, access matrix, retention justification, challenge workflow, anti-retaliation commitments, sunset rules). Every retention window and drill-down has a one-line necessity argument (UK ICO / CNIL / EDPB style).
The honest part: we are pre-certification. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 take time. What we have today is architecture designed to survive audit — not something scrambled together before the auditor arrives.
JP ASR on multi-speaker meetings only became good enough in 2023–2024. Sortformer v2 DER on CALLHOME: 12.7%.
EU AI Act Art. 5 (Feb 2025) + Annex III §4 (Aug 2026) crystallized the defensible approach.
“Governance infrastructure” bridges engagement tools, compliance tools, productivity tools. Courage to cross.
Pointing the mirror upward at power is politically dangerous. It's our defining feature.
K-anon + DP + 4-tier retention + audit trails + 就業規則 consent is 6–12 months of infra most skip.
Traditional HR buyers want defensive tools. CEO buyers want preventive. Different sale, higher value.
| Capability | Kashi | Archaic / FRONTEO | Viva Glint | Read.ai | Wevox / Geppo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structural pattern detection (not content) | ✓ | – | – | – | – |
| Mirror points upward at power | ✓ | – | refused | – | – |
| Keigo (敬語) asymmetry (JP-specific) | ✓ | – | – | – | – |
| Refuses company-wide health score | ✓ | – | – | – | – |
| EU AI Act Art. 5 clean by design | ✓ | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Published harassment-outcome evidence | pending NAQ-R study | – | – | – | – |
Pricing provisional · under validation.
Not “introduce me to the CEO.” A pilot that survives scrutiny needs three introductions at one 50–500-person JP company:
90-day pilot. Real data, real consultation, real outcome measurement.
500-person co × ¥5.25M avg salary × 5% productivity drag = ¥131M/yr at stake. Shifting 10–20% of cases from late- to early-stage = ¥13M–¥26M/yr recovered. Model-based plausibility check — not a proven return.
| Starter | Professional | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scale | up to 20 employees | up to 500 employees | 500+ / multi-region |
| Detectors | 4 core structural | all 8 (incl. keigo & response-latency) | all 8 + evidence vault (E2E) |
| Views | Manager Mirror + self-visibility | + Executive Brief + feedforward | + custom role matrix |
| Retention | 90-day hard delete | 24-month analytics | configurable |
| Data residency | shared JP region | dedicated JP region | choice incl. on-prem (roadmap) |
| Labor-consultation packet | — | downloadable template | hands-on review |
| Compliance artifacts | — | — | SOC 2 Type II + ISO 27001 |
| Support | community | email · 72h SLA | 24/7 · dedicated CSM |
ROI values above are model-based plausibility checks, not proven returns. Real validation comes from signed deals and discount behavior, not a slide.
Live: kashi-lilac.vercel.app · Business plan: /business.html · Built in 23h · 2026-04-21