NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) has developed generative artificial intelligence (AI) that is customizable for each customer in order to create new value for companies in response to business changes caused by new technologies. Starting this month in Japan, the new “NEC Generative AI Service” will begin providing licenses for proprietary large language models (LLM), dedicated hardware, software, consulting services and more, then sequentially expanding to new markets after FY2024.
Moreover, in collaboration with approximately 10 companies and universities, NEC is also launching the “NEC Generative AI Advanced Customer Program” in July, which works with customers to support the creation of models for them as well as the development of software, organizations, etc. for the utilization of LLM.
In addition, on July 1, the “NEC Generative AI Hub” was established as a specialized organization for promoting the business transformation of customers, consisting of researchers, prompt engineers who provide precise instructions to AI, consultants, digital trust specialists and other professionals. NEC aims to achieve sales of 50 billion yen (approximately $346 million USD) over the next three years from these generative AI-related businesses.
The area of generative AI is attracting significant market attention as companies and local governments consider business transformation using various language models, such as ChatGPT, which recently surpassed 100 million users within two months of its service launch in November 2022.
However, when using generative AI, there are security issues related to information leakage and vulnerability, as well as issues related to accuracy and continuous use of the system. In addition, for corporate use, it is necessary to make efforts to use it for more essential purposes than translation and summarization, such as modeling the knowledge accumulated in a company and developing a system to promote its use within the company.
NEC began using generative AI for internal business use in May of this year. An environment and system that can be used safely and securely by employees were built in two weeks. The system is also linked to internal systems such as internal chat and web conferencing tools, and is being used by about 20,000 users, or about 10,000 times a day.
As a result, the system is beginning to produce results, such as an 80% reduction in man-hours required to create source code for internal system development, a 50% reduction in the time required to create documents, and a reduction in the time required to take meeting minutes from an average of 30 minutes to approximately 5 minutes.
NEC will continue to use the system to improve the efficiency of document proofreading and other tasks common to all employees, as well as in specialized areas such as software development, while reflecting the know-how gained through in-house use of its LLM-related services.
Based on the resolution of these kinds of challenges and internal use, NEC will now provide its own generative AI for creating new corporate value.