NEC (6701) Innovation Day 2024 summary

Innovation strategy and R&D strength

• Integrated R&D, intellectual property, and new business development drive competitive advantage in IT services and social infrastructure.

• Approximately 2,000 specialized professionals, with 40% of R&D staff based overseas, maintain top-10 global AI research rankings for 20 years.

• Focus on globally leading technologies in biometric authentication, video recognition, prescriptive AI, and generative AI.

• Ongoing technology vision initiatives since 2022 foster external collaboration and future readiness.

• Promoting global collaboration and talent development, aiming to train 1,000 employees in LLM skills.

AI and digital platform business developments

• BluStellar concept integrates consulting, development, and delivery, emphasizing dynamic, evolving AI agents for workflow redesign.

• Launched new AI Technology Services Business Division in August, unifying R&D, business development, and operations.

• Service business expansion includes generative AI solutions for healthcare and manufacturing, and collaboration with Sakura Internet for domestic AI platforms.

• Expanded AI talent development program aims to train 1,000 experts.

• AI agent technology is being deployed for autonomous business process automation, with phased rollout of NEC AI Agent Service starting December 2024.

New product and technology announcements

• Launching cotomi Version 2, a refined Japanese LLM with enhanced pre/post-processing and power efficiency.

• Shipping new autonomous AI agents capable of enterprise search and workflow execution.

• Expanding multimodal AI capabilities to interpret charts, tables, and complex diagrams.

• Full compliance with evolving AI regulations, supporting customer trust and adoption, including anti-hallucination and AI firewall technologies.

• Released MegaOak/iS electronic medical record system and announced AI integration in PLM solutions for manufacturing.