Mountains of paperwork are still common in many offices in Japan and elsewhere. It can be physical or digital. A recent survey of over 10,000 office workers by a U.S. tech firm found respondents were wasting more than 40% of their day on repetitive data work. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors are playing an increasing role in generating data, but manual data entry hasn’t gone away. In aging Japan, a shrinking workforce is putting pressure on companies to change. To address this challenge, the Japanese public and private sectors are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to automate tasks and boost worker productivity and job satisfaction.

Source: www.forbes.com

Cinnamon AI spices up dull tasks

One company that has been turning heads in this effort is Tokyo-based Cinnamon AI. Founded in 2012, it’s committed to extending human potential to transform unstructured date into actionable, structured data. Its main product is Flax Scanner, a “cognitive document reader” that uses machine learning algorithms to automatically identify and retrieve key text elements in documents. It works with digital and printed sources, including faxes, invoices, contracts, handwritten notes, PDFs, and Word files. The company says it has an accuracy of over 99%.

“We live in the information era, and companies have tons of data—actually 80% of all data is unstructured data or untagged data, which cannot be recognized by AI. Our work is filled with unstructured data, such as emails, videos, images, and speeches,” says Hirano Miku, cofounder and CEO of Cinnamon AI. “Until now, we’ve needed humans to work on data to structure it for databases. Unstructured data is the key for office workers to work more efficiently. We create AI to understand unstructured data.”

Businesses can save up to 90% on labor costs with Cinnamon AI’s solutions, according to Hirano. Her company’s solutions have been adopted by major brands in Japan such as Dai-ichi Life Insurance, Kansai Electric Power, and Showa Denko. Hirano now has her sights set on overseas markets such as the U.S., where the company has a sales office in Texas.

Forging a global company

Hirano became interested in and focused on computer science and AI as a student at the University of Tokyo. It was during that time that she met Kitano Hiroaki, CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, who inspired her to enter the startup world; Kitano is now a Cinnamon AI advisor. She sold her first company, smartphone middleware maker Naked Technologies, to Japanese social network Mixi in 2011. She then founded Cinnamon AI with fellow AI specialist Hotta Hajime and began focusing on AI as a business in 2016. Driven by Hirano’s passion for innovation, the firm now has over $17 million in funding, AI labs in Taiwan and Vietnam due to its many skilled programmers. The company’s main businesses are its AI products and AI consulting services.

Hirano says Cinnamon AI’s strengths lie in its ability to turn unstructured data into structured data that can help companies improve productivity. She also thinks her ambitions for Cinnamon AI’s growth are another thing that make it unique. She wants to be global—as proof, only 40 of Cinnamon AI’s 200 staff are Japanese.

“I wanted to make a company like Google to change everybody’s life,” Hirano says about her first company. “In 2017, my son was born, and that influenced our mission at Cinnamon AI. I wanted to change the current lifestyle in Japan with everyone working long hours and feeling so much pressure. I’d like to make a world in which people can be happy and only work five hours a day.”

AI-powered future

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry chose Cinnamon AI for its J-Startup program highlighting pioneering young Japanese companies, and it’s a good example of how the public and private sector are cooperating to innovate business and human resource development. This is one effort to seed the coming age of cyber-physical integration known as Society 5.0. This human-centered, technological society is expected to free us from stressful work and help us enjoy more fullfiling lives. Gathering data to free employees from administrative work, Cinnamon AI is one of the leading companies helping Japan realize Society 5.0.

Japan has long been a dominant player in fields such as industrial automation, and it’s now focused on cultivating “hidden gems” in AI such as tech unicorn Preferred Networks, valued at over $2 billion, so their technologies can benefit society. Under its 2018 Future Investment Strategy, the Government is emphasizing what it calls human-centric AI. It’s founded on the three principles of dignity, diversity and inclusion, and sustainability. In practice, it means that AI systems should be used to augment human workers, who are the decision-makers when it comes to using the fruits of AI, and that there should be equal education opportunities for AI literacy. The strategy also highlights the importance of privacy protection, ensuring security, fair competition, transparency and innovation.

“We’re very aligned with government policy because of our mission of changing work styles,” says Hirano. “The purpose of the J Startup program is to create unicorns, and we want to achieve that quickly while aiming to be the number one global business AI company.”

Note: All Japanese names in this article are given in the traditional Japanese order, with surname first.

To learn more about Cinnamon AI, click here.

To learn more about the Japanese Government’s AI strategy, click here.