From Senior Architect to AI Pioneer: Why Masahiro Kato Left Traditional Practice to Reshape How Architects Work

Masahiro Kato spent ten years watching buildings go from first sketch to finished structure and watching design lose ground to everything around it. The frustration became a question, and the question became a career change.

A decade of seeing projects through.

Masahiro Kato is Architectural Solution Lead at Tektome. He spent the ten years before that at Nikken Sekkei, and counts himself lucky in how it began: his early projects were small enough that he could follow each one from start to finish and see it realized.

That vantage point taught him the whole process and every pain point buried inside it. Few architects get to feel the full arc of a project so early, and it gave him an unusually complete picture of where the work breaks down.

When the work stopped being design.

Like many architects, Masa entered the profession believing design could make the world a better place. In practice, the creative work he wanted kept giving way to client discussions and project management.

Part of that is the nature of the job. Architects set out to build something distinctive, then run into the constraints their clients live with: revenue, budgets, timelines and the unique idea is slowly pulled back towards the conventional one that fits the numbers.

COVID sharpened the problem. Masahiro was assigned to large retail projects with far longer horizons and a widening web of stakeholders to coordinate. The balance tipped further from design and towards management, away from the value-creating work he had come to do.

One question: how do we make this more efficient?

That question is what set everything in motion.

I kept asking myself: how can we make this more efficient? That question is what started everything.

— Masahiro Kato, Architectural Solution Lead, Tektome

It sent Masa searching online, where he came across Incubit, Tektome’s parent company, looking for someone with an architecture background. A casual meeting followed.

Finding a team already asking the same thing.

What he heard resonated immediately. The pain points he had lived through were the same ones Tektome’s founder, Naoki, had already recognized and thought through across the industry. One in particular stood out: architects were too busy to learn new software, so they kept falling back on familiar workflows, AutoCAD instead of Revit, rather than adopting the tools meant to help them.

Masa joined when Tektome was still a concept and just five people, four months after that first meeting. A rudimentary proof of concept for storage was already built. The pace was the draw, the team moved fast, and that was exactly what attracted him.

It was also a culture shock. Coming from traditional practice, where quality is refined slowly over long timelines, he had to adjust to a place where speed of iteration mattered more.

What makes it worth it.

Three things stand out for Masa about life at Tektome:

• The global mentality of the team: more flexible, practical and efficient.
• The chance to learn from design firms around the world and how their workflows differ.
• Above all, the client conversations, where a shared background does the work.

Because he has felt the same frictions they describe, he connects with the architects he talks to straight away. That common ground, he says, changes the entire conversation.

That global outlook recently took him to the UK, a move he had been weighing for more than a year. He wanted to reach the global market as fast as possible, and the addition of Henry Turner, our Solutions Architect in London, helped him navigate the transition.

Where AI actually helps architects.

Ask Masa about AI in the AEC industry and he starts by clearing away the fear. Replacement is the wrong frame; leverage is the right one.

He sees a real shift underway. AI used to mean one-shot exchanges, one question, one answer. Now it can cultivate knowledge over time, understand the reasoning behind a decision, and hold context across a project rather than starting cold each time.

That capability matters most in a field like AEC, which runs on interpretation and grey areas. Even regulations are read differently by different architects, and the knowledge for reading them well tends to live inside the firm rather than in any rulebook.

Deep experience, fast-moving technology.

Masahiro’s path from senior architect to leading AI initiatives for the AEC industry is the combination we are building for at Tektome: hard-won industry experience meeting technology that moves quickly. If any of this sounds like your own frustration, we would like to hear from you.