It has been over three-and-a-half years since the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT spurred booming corporate interest in generative artificial intelligence tools to remake work. And yet Hitachi, which employs nearly 290,000 globally, still hasn’t deployed a single, enterprise-wide AI tool for all workers across the Japanese conglomerate.
This more cautious approach may prove to be prudent for Hitachi, given that research has shown a high number of enterprise AI pilots fail and a debate that’s intensified regarding the cost of AI, leading most large employers like Hitachi to closely track workplace AI usage as costs rise.
Bala Krishnapillai, the senior vice president and chief information officer of Hitachi’s Americas division, says there are plenty of AI tools that have been widely embraced by the company’s workforce. His internal AI adoption strategy focuses on three buckets. The first are everyday productivity tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, used to summarize emails, meetings notes, and for translation, the latter especially critical for the 607 subsidiaries that operate across 190 global markets.
Krishnapillai says his IT team works closely with business leaders to evaluate and approve job-specific tools, which can include AI-enabled content creation used by creative professionals or for competitive analysis to help the sales team. The third focus area is on developers and AI coding assistants, where Hitachi works closely with Anthropic.
