What is the 'Judgment' that remains in companies in the AI era? It is not about knowing precedents, but about determining how to proceed by discerning differences while selectively applying those precedents (Organizational Behavioral Science®)

Request Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Shinjuku, Tokyo; CEO: Tomoyasu Kabata), a provider of Organizational Behavioral Science®, has released a report outlining what 'judgment' remains for companies in the AI era, based on the practices and analysis of 980 companies and 338,000 individuals. Download the Report d68315-191-ee0eaef1cf035a02285076995c6a1e99.pdfThe theme of this report is the most fundamental question that serves as a prerequisite for human resource development and job design in the AI era: What exactly does 'judgment' mean in a corporate context? While the importance of judgment is discussed in many companies, development and design cannot progress if the definition remains vague. Therefore, this report redefines judgment not as an abstract capability, but as a practical operational act. With the spread of generative AI, answering based on knowledge, organizing information, and processing tasks according to existing procedures are becoming faster and more accurate than ever. Furthermore, for work involving precedents, AI is increasingly capable of supplementing tasks where the current conditions are nearly identical to the past and precedents can be applied directly. On the other hand, many tasks remain in corporate settings where: ・Circumstances differ for each customer ・Constraints vary by project ・Priorities differ by site ・The points of focus vary by stakeholder In such situations, merely referring to precedents is insufficient. What is required is to: ・Verify what is different this time ・Determine how far to use precedents ・Decide where to change the approach We define this act of determining how to proceed based on conditional differences as 'judgment.' While knowing precedents, understanding procedures, and sharing past cases will remain necessary, the central argument of this report is that these alone are not enough. The 'work' referred to here is not merely a job title or task name. It refers to all practical tasks performed daily in companies, such as sales, planning, management, site operations, customer support, subordinate support, and system administration. However, what is important is not the name of the work, but the conditions under which that work is established: whether it is work that proceeds stably if methods and standards are taught concretely, or work that requires adjusting priorities and response policies according to differences in the counterpart or situation.