On September 9, Hiroshi Kodama, Corporate EVP and CAXO of NEC, revealed a goal to reduce the actual token costs for company-wide AI utilization to one-tenth of the costs for equivalent usage patterns as of April 2026, by the second half of 2026.

While the volume of AI usage is expected to increase, the company plans to curb costs by improving utilization efficiency. Specific initiatives include implementing routing to distribute processing to the optimal AI model based on the task, differentiating between frontier models and open-weight models, utilizing caching by storing and reusing parts of previous inputs, organizing reference context data, and considering the use of fixed-rate services.

Aiming to transform into an AI-native company, NEC established the "Corporate AI & Workforce Department" on August 1, 2026. This department is building a framework where AI autonomously fulfills roles from department heads to employees, while humans control quality and governance.

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