Ikuma Hirahara

Leveraging AI to Challenge Customers to Solve Their Problems

I joined Macnica after having a conversation with Macnica 's human resources at the Boston Career Forum, which I attended while I was studying abroad in the United States. All the employees I spoke with were very kind and charming, so I was interested and listened to their stories in detail. I learned that Macnica is a technology trading company that handles many cutting-edge products from overseas, and I was able to experience new technology. I decided to join the company because I was confident that I would be able to achieve personal growth while working, and that I would be able to utilize my language skills to work globally.

For three years after joining the company, I was in charge of sales of cyber security products, but now I am in charge of the business architect of the problem-solving solution service using AI technology developed by CrowdANALYTIX. A business architect is a job that provides a wide range of support, from listening to customer issues to planning, proposing, and implementing AI solutions, and solving business issues that customers face.

One thing we need to be careful about in our work is that many customers think that AI is something like "magic" that can do anything. AI has tremendous potential and is a useful technology that can solve various social issues, but it cannot be denied that it is still in the development stage at this stage. We are proceeding with the project while gradually closing the gap between the customer's expectations and what can actually be done.

Furthermore, although the technology itself called AI is now widely recognized around the world, the current level of recognition of Macnica 's AI business is low. Therefore, it is extremely important to create the initial opportunity to propose our AI solutions to customers. In addition to directly proposing services to customers, I also actively engage in activities that lead to awareness of our services, such as disclosing information on our company's website and speaking at various events such as marketing seminars. Many Japanese customers are very concerned about examples of adoption by others, so if we can increase the number of successful cases using AI technology and make more examples available to the world, we would like to improve our customers' AI We expect the adoption of solutions to increase.

Know Your Customers and Create with Them

I am in charge of a wide range of customers, including intermediate distribution companies, logistics companies, retail companies, and manufacturers. As a result, customer issues vary depending on the industry, business content, company size, and other factors. What is needed here is the catch-up ability to “know the customer”. Our business does not have an existing model, and we need to build it according to the industry, business, and issues of each customer. It is the customer's point of view that is important. Unless we can think of things in the same way as our customers, we cannot make good proposals, and we cannot have efficient discussions with them. In order to have a customer's point of view, first of all, "know the customer". Study hard and deepen your understanding.

We need to start from something that everyone takes for granted, ``knowing our customers.'' What we are doing is creating a completely new business for Macnica, something that no one has ever done before. This is because we are challenging the field. Our business is a co-creation model where we "create" together with our customers, rather than "selling" them. We step into the unknown, think from the same perspective as our customers, and solve their problems using cutting-edge technology. The satisfaction of this job is so great that I can't express it in words.

Also, precisely because our business is based on a co-creation model, our customers sometimes tell us that they are glad that they were able to work with Mr. Hirahara on this project. This is the greatest joy in my current job. It is precisely because we work together with our customers that we are happy together when we produce results, and we are able to hear the words, "Let's work together again next time." The real pleasure of this job is not only the success of the project, but also the sense of accomplishment that comes from receiving words of gratitude from the customer by working closely with the customer to produce results.

We Will Change the Conventional Wisdom of the Industry

I am working with the enthusiasm of using AI to change the industry's "common sense" and improve the industry as a whole. I believe that I have been entrusted with such a significant work, and I believe that if the cutting-edge technology we handle and the passionate team members are combined, we will be able to achieve unprecedented change. I'm here.

Recently, we have been working on new AI research and development with customers in the logistics industry. In the logistics industry, the volume of cargo being transported is increasing due in part to the rise of e-commerce, but at the same time it faces the serious issue of a labor shortage. Of course, no matter how many transportation requests we receive from our customers, we cannot handle them without the truck drivers who transport them and the employees who manage the goods in our warehouses. Therefore, we decided to work with our customers to develop a demand forecasting AI that aims to optimize truck driver and vehicle deployment. Until now, the amount to be delivered to each customer store was not determined until the day before or the day of delivery, and the arrangements for trucks and drivers were made based on individual know-how, so it was difficult to respond when there were more items to be delivered than the person in charge expected. When there were no staff, or when there were only a few, we had to hire extra staff, which caused operational inefficiency. In order to solve these problems, we will develop multiple demand forecasts optimized for each target store based on shipping performance data, store event information, visitor number data, weather/temperature data, etc. for each customer store. We are jointly developing an AI model with our customers. Since our customers have nearly 200 logistics centers, a large number of AI models are required. Macnica has an affiliated company with an AI platform company that has a data scientist community, and we can utilize its resources to build AI models. I will continue to work on it.

We believe that if this solution is developed, it will not only solve the problems that we are currently proposing to our customers, but it will also be a step towards revolutionizing the logistics industry as a whole, which is suffering from chronic labor shortages. It's still a small "seed" now, but I'm going to nurture this seed from here and grow it.