The "GDS2025 World Digital Summit" (organized by Nikkei Inc.), which explores the potential for building a new society through cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), was held in Tokyo in July. Kei Uruma, President and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric, took the stage to deliver a presentation titled "Resolving Social Challenges through Transformation into an Innovative Company," where he outlined the company's key initiatives. He conveyed a strong commitment to evolving from an "Operational Company" that channels management resources primarily into expanding established businesses to an "Innovative Company" that continuously generates new value, undeterred by risks.

The presentation began with a video that expressed the Mitsubishi Electric Group's ambition and purpose. The video illustrates a commitment to "making everyday life more positive" and symbolically features red gerbera flowers throughout, representing "passion and limitless challenge." This echoes Mitsubishi Electric's purpose to persistently address societal challenges, including climate change and population decline, through its innovative business efforts.

The presentation centered on transforming Mitsubishi Electric into an "Innovative Company", driven by three key concepts: "Business Model Transformation," "Strengthening the Digital Infrastructure," and "Mindset Transformation."

At the core of the "Business Model Transformation" is Mitsubishi Electric's new digital platform, "Serendie^®." President Uruma explained that while the company has been involved in developing control devices and other products across a wide range of business areas since its founding, efforts to share data between businesses hadn't progressed. Serendie^® integrates and analyzes abundant data from various components and services to identify customers' latent needs, creating new value to solve their challenges. He noted that Serendie^®'s activities are bringing about three changes: "Creating services," "Expansion the value recipients," and "Component enhancement." The company aims to achieve sales of related businesses of 1.1 trillion yen by fiscal year 2030.

To foster "Business Model Transformation," it is crucial to strengthen the digital infrastructure. Acknowledging the rapidly evolving digital technology landscape, President Uruma emphasized that global collaboration with external partners is essential, rather than developing everything in-house. He discussed "Serendie Street Yokohama," which opened in January 2025 as the core base for Serendie^® and a prime example of this strategy to connect internal and external talent. The facility acts as a co-creation stage where engineers from customer and partner companies can collaborate with the company’s own data scientists to explore and experiment and to generate free thinking and new ideas.

Further building on the rapid evolution of AI, he introduced the vision of realizing a unique physical AI, "Neuro-Physical AI™." This technology will be capable of autonomously assessing, learning, and resolving on-site challenges. By leveraging vast data from diverse devices and the "tacit knowledge" of engineers, the company makes it possible to achieve fully automated factories, seamlessly managing everything from parts delivery to final shipping.

In addition to establishing a hardware infrastructure to drive innovation, transforming mindsets is equally vital. Mitsubishi Electric is advancing "Mindset Transformation" through both "Expansion of DX Talent" and "Cultivating a New Corporate Culture."

Mitsubishi Electric has established the "DX Innovation Academy" to nurture internal DX talent, offering educational programs tailored to seven skill categories, and has partnered with Waseda University to create an environment for learning cutting-edge theories. President Uruma stated, "The key is to expand talent equipped with both technology and a mindset suited for agile development to address challenges swiftly. We aim to double our current DX talent of approximately 10,000 by 2030, strengthening recruitment and advancing overseas infrastructure through M&A."

Mitsubishi Electric has been advancing the "My Purpose Project" since 2023, where 150,000 group employees, including President Uruma and other members of management, set and express their individual aspirations.
This initiative fosters resonance between personal aspirations and the company’s purpose. President Uruma stated, "This encourages each individual to engage more proactively and positively in their work, continuously seeking ways to enhance the value of their respective businesses and daring to challenge new values without fear of risks."

Mitsubishi Electric is uniting the strength of 150,000 members across the group to steadily advance its transformation into an "Innovative Company" through three key reforms.

At the "GDS2025 World Digital Summit" (organized by Nikkei Inc.), a panel discussion titled "Considering Industrial Data: How to Enhance Industrial Competitiveness through Data Integration" was also held, with Mitsubishi Electric’s Senior Vice President and CDO/CIO Satoshi Takeda as a speaker.

CDO Takeda introduced Mitsubishi Electric’s "Circular Digital-Engineering" initiative, to which the company attaches great importance, and outlined the company’s direction in an AI-driven society.

Mitsubishi Electric provides hardware and software across 12 business areas, including electric power, defense and aerospace systems, and factory automation, making it possible to generate vast amounts of data daily. The company’s digital-driven circular business model leverages this data to enhance customer value through its products. "We are advancing efforts to move beyond individual business domains, combining data from different sectors to create even greater value," explained CDO Takeda. "By building ‘Serendie^®,’ a company-wide digital co-creation platform, we are already generating new value, such as total energy solutions, from combinations like ‘power × factory’ and ‘power × transportation,’" he added, citing specific examples.

Japanese manufacturing companies are renowned for the strong independence of their business divisions, which often hinders the advancement of cross-divisional initiatives. When asked about the operational challenges, CDO Takeda first clarified, "Serendie^® is not an initiative primarily intended to dismantle the 'silos' across businesses. Instead, with customer needs evolving dramatically amid factors like carbon neutrality, it became essential to pursue cross-divisional efforts to address those shifts." He added, "However, the mindset of sharing data company-wide has not yet fully permeated the organization. To foster this, we've introduced slogans such as the 'Data Utilization Declaration,' and the president himself persistently advocates for 'initiatives essential to our customers,' actively working to transform employee mindsets." Additionally, he addressed the global transition from globalization toward fragmentation, observing that "even in data utilization, we're increasingly required to segment approaches by regional blocks."

He also emphasized that "the value lies not in the data itself, but in using data to uncover customers’ challenges." As the discussion shifted to the potential of "physical AI"—which involves analyzing data gathered from real-world environments like factories with AI to precisely control robots and other systems—he stated, "If we enable AI to learn the ‘tacit knowledge’ of the workplace and collaborate with humans in an autonomous, decentralized manner, it can contribute to a society facing population decline. Japan’s strengths in manufacturing can be leveraged in the field of autonomous, decentralized edge AI." In response, other panelists offered encouragement, urging the development of "world-leading edge AI."

Written by Our Stories Editing Team