"Is Your Company AI Ready?" --Keigo Shimada of DATA BUSINESS Co., Ltd. asks, revealing the truth of AI utilization unlocked by data cleansing.

DATA BUSINESS Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Masaharu Kimura), a member of the Japan Association of Software Companies (SAJ), which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year and has over 800 member companies, is a data-specialized company that has continued to solve corporate data utilization challenges with its unique virtual data integration method, "DataForce®," at its core. Keigo Shimada, a director at the company, was a pioneer who quickly held the title of data scientist in 2015 when the term was not yet common, and he created training curricula for the National Tax Agency and launched Japan's first data scientist lectures in a university MBA course (since 2016). Based on this background, this release introduces the question "Is Your Company AI Ready?", which was posed in March 2026, and the trajectory of Mr. Shimada, who has pioneered the industry for 10 years.

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Blind Spot of the Generative AI Boom: AI cannot function without an "AI Ready" data foundation

As a background, companies rushing to "introduce AI" have rapidly increased amidst the generative AI and AI agent boom since 2025. However, on March 10, 2026, Mr. Shimada raised the question "Is Your Company AI Ready?" on his company's website, pointing out a blind spot in the AI boom.

"It is said that 80% of a data scientist's job is data cleansing. We were the first in Japan to give it form."

No matter how high-performing AI is introduced, if its learning and reference data are inconsistent, accurate analysis and reliable decision-making support cannot be achieved. For example, order data might exist in three systems for each business division, and even for gender, three types of notations such as "male/female," "1/2," and "M/F" may be mixed – this is the reality of actual data. Mr. Shimada has achieved data cleansing on a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of items with DataForce®, a proprietary method for organizing this "chaos of data."

On the other hand, data cleansing is a prerequisite for AI but is often overlooked. An "AI Ready" state refers to a state where a high-quality data foundation is in place, allowing AI to learn and reference data correctly. DATA BUSINESS Co., Ltd. is one of the earliest companies in Japan to commercialize this "preparatory phase."

Annual cost reduction of 2 billion yen: The overwhelming value of "nitty-gritty work" proven by numbers

From the perspective of cost reduction, the procurement performance figures most eloquently speak to the value of data utilization. Among the projects Mr. Shimada has handled, the most impressive was the procurement data integration for a global company.

"Customer integration and product integration are at most in the tens of thousands of units. But parts integration is 10 times, 100 times that scale. From a single screw to a single steel plate, everything is managed with different part numbers, reaching hundreds of thousands to millions of units. This is not a volume that humans can handle."

By utilizing DataForce® and gradually integrating parts with high analysis priority, it was discovered that one country among the company's 10 global factories was purchasing parts at approximately twice the price of other countries. Based on this data-driven corrective action, a remarkable achievement of reducing annual procurement costs by 2 billion yen was made for just 3 to 5 main items...