Beverage and health food giant Kirin Holdings and its group companies have been rolling out “AI executives” in board meetings and management conferences in stages since last July.
Known as CoreMate, these AI executives each cover one of 12 specialized fields—including human resources, finance, and sales—drawing on vast troves of internal and external data along with records of past executives’ remarks.
From that data, they analyze issues and viewpoints in real time and display them as text on a monitor in the meeting room, raising points for the human executives to consider.
Beyond Reporting Sessions
Human executives deepen their discussions by interacting with the AI executives. Meetings made up only of humans can easily turn into little more than reporting sessions, but bringing multiple angles into the room without deference is said to enrich the debate considerably.
The AI executives began as an idea from Yayoi Kimura of Kirin’s Corporate Strategy Department. With backing from top management, three staff members from the Digital ICT Strategy Department—including Yuki Mayumi—built the system entirely in-house in just two months.
“The point isn’t only to use AI for operational efficiency—it’s about how much we can deepen discussion in meetings tied to management decisions,” said Kanoko Yamazaki of the Corporate Strategy Department, who oversees the program.
Kirin uses the term “personality” for each of the 12 AI executives’ roles. “Rather than ‘character’ or ‘persona,’ we deliberately chose the word ‘personality,'” Kimura said. “Each AI executive absorbs a different set of information, so their outputs differ from one another.”
Kirin is also moving ahead with plans for a virtual meeting made up entirely of AI executives. “There’s a high probability it would produce a better conclusion,” Kimura said. “But they are still just advisors. The final decision stays with humans—the two will coexist.”
The company has received a flood of outside inquiries about the AI executives, including requests asking whether the system could be sold externally.
Human Passion Remains
Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) announced last summer that it had introduced an “AI-CEO” modeled on an avatar of its president, Toru Nakashima.
The system draws on Nakashima’s remarks at management meetings, impressions of him gathered from other executives, and the company’s history to generate responses meant to resemble the man himself.
Employees chat with “AI President Nakashima” on everything from operational reform to job know-how, seeking advice and direction. On average, as many as 2,000 employees use the tool a day—out of roughly 28,000 at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
“The idea was to make AI feel familiar to every employee,” said Mamoru Nishikiori of the company’s AI transformation promotion department, who led development. “It now responds in a way that resembles the real President Nakashima, and it’s also helping employees sharpen how they do their jobs.”
He added that there are currently no plans to hand actual management decisions to the AI-CEO.
Mototsugu Hoshino, who heads the planning group handling AI strategy in that department, was asked about the role of humans in the age of AI.
“Even if we hand off what people used to do to AI purely for efficiency and automate it, what we deliver to the customer doesn’t change. The business itself doesn’t evolve,” he said.
“I believe that what remains in the end as truly human value is the passion and drive of people who push to dramatically raise customer satisfaction—even when it doesn’t look rational.”
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(Read the article in Japanese.)
Author: The Sankei Shimbun
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