【Wrap Up】Snowflake and NEC Hold Press Briefing on "Management Cockpit x Snowflake Intelligence Utilization"
Snowflake, an AI data cloud provider, and NEC held a joint press briefing to showcase NEC's advanced AI strategy leveraging the "Management Cockpit" powered by Snowflake Intelligence. NEC has integrated data and AI utilizing Snowflake as its core platform, achieving tangible results such as a 5.5% improvement in gross profit margin.
📋 Article Processing Timeline
- 📰 Published: April 24, 2026 at 22:00
- 🔍 Collected: April 24, 2026 at 13:31
- 🤖 AI Analyzed: April 24, 2026 at 14:32 (1h 1m after Collected)
AI data cloud provider Snowflake G.K. (hereinafter Snowflake) held a press briefing for media on April 14th on the theme of "Management Cockpit x Snowflake Intelligence Utilization" by NEC Corporation (location: Minato-ku, Tokyo; hereinafter NEC). At the briefing, Mr. Noriaki Seki, Senior Director of the AI Platform Management Department, Corporate IT & AI Innovation Division at NEC, introduced specific initiatives as an advanced example of AI and data utilization for management decision-making.
At the outset, Ryuji Ukita, President of Snowflake, took the stage and emphasized, "'No AI strategy without a data strategy.' The success of an AI strategy depends on robust data connectivity and engineering." He cited "three walls" that many Japanese companies face as factors contributing to management stagnation: "information silos," "absence of truth," and "delayed decision-making." As a solution, Snowflake advocated for establishing a "Single Source of Truth" that centrally manages reliable company-wide data. He stated that this would encourage an update to "proactive management in the AI era," where executives themselves identify issues and make immediate decisions. Ukita said, "With the power of data, management will surely change. Snowflake provides a strong 'AI Ready' foundation where AI can function immediately."
Next, Mr. Seki explained the background of NEC's efforts over the past five years, where under the "client zero" policy, the company used itself as a testing ground for internal implementation, integrating its internal data infrastructure into the "One NEC Data Platform" to promote internal data utilization. For five years, NEC has positioned Snowflake at the core of its data platform, building multiple dashboards such as Management Cockpit, Price Management, and Security Dashboard, and advancing visualization directly linked to management decisions. In its new mid-term management plan starting from fiscal year 2026, NEC outlined a strategy to fully accelerate AI Transformation (AX) and achieve an "AI Native Company" in five years.
As initiatives supporting AI utilization, NEC has established "NEC Generative AI Service (NGS)" to securely utilize the latest LLMs and built an environment that can leverage internal data through a RAG mechanism. This platform is deployed as a foundation available to approximately 80,000 employees nationwide. Furthermore, they introduced "Knowledge AI," a platform that easily creates AI "clones" with individual personalities and expertise, with approximately 1,800 clone AIs already created since its release in December 2025. By integrating this AI into the "Management Cockpit," the platform where management decisions are made, the AI of the President and CxOs analyzes dashboards daily and automatically generates comments and insights from a management perspective. Mr. Seki expressed confidence, stating, "Visualization has enabled appropriate pricing, leading to quantitative results such as a 5.5% improvement in NEC's standalone GP ratio from FY2022 to FY2024."
To utilize not only structured data but also approximately 30PB of unstructured data such as documents and audio within the company, NEC introduced Snowflake Intelligence. This has been further enhanced with NEC's (NGS) technology, focusing on three points:
- **Enhanced Document Understanding:** Utilizing NEC's "Diagram/Text Context Understanding Technology" to verbalize graphs and images within documents, improving AI's comprehension.
- **Enhanced Analysis and Insight Generation:** Combining with Knowledge AI to provide advanced insights through expert AI.
- **Strengthening/Extending the Semantic Layer:** Training with internal terminology and variations in notation to improve the accuracy of natural language data exploration.
Regarding future prospects, Mr. Seki explained that they are advancing the semantic layer and ontology to enable AI to deeply understand the meaning of data, make autonomous judgments, and take action. By organizing business knowledge and management indicators in a way that AI can interpret, he envisioned, "We are now creating a world where AI agents automatically execute tasks."
About Snowflake
Snowflake, as a platform for the AI era, helps organizations innovate faster and extract more value from their data. Over 13,300 customers, including hundreds of the world's largest companies, leverage Snowflake's AI Data Cloud to build, use, and share data, applications, and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI become a transformative force for everyone. Learn more at snowflake.com/ja (NYSE: SNOW).
At the outset, Ryuji Ukita, President of Snowflake, took the stage and emphasized, "'No AI strategy without a data strategy.' The success of an AI strategy depends on robust data connectivity and engineering." He cited "three walls" that many Japanese companies face as factors contributing to management stagnation: "information silos," "absence of truth," and "delayed decision-making." As a solution, Snowflake advocated for establishing a "Single Source of Truth" that centrally manages reliable company-wide data. He stated that this would encourage an update to "proactive management in the AI era," where executives themselves identify issues and make immediate decisions. Ukita said, "With the power of data, management will surely change. Snowflake provides a strong 'AI Ready' foundation where AI can function immediately."
Next, Mr. Seki explained the background of NEC's efforts over the past five years, where under the "client zero" policy, the company used itself as a testing ground for internal implementation, integrating its internal data infrastructure into the "One NEC Data Platform" to promote internal data utilization. For five years, NEC has positioned Snowflake at the core of its data platform, building multiple dashboards such as Management Cockpit, Price Management, and Security Dashboard, and advancing visualization directly linked to management decisions. In its new mid-term management plan starting from fiscal year 2026, NEC outlined a strategy to fully accelerate AI Transformation (AX) and achieve an "AI Native Company" in five years.
As initiatives supporting AI utilization, NEC has established "NEC Generative AI Service (NGS)" to securely utilize the latest LLMs and built an environment that can leverage internal data through a RAG mechanism. This platform is deployed as a foundation available to approximately 80,000 employees nationwide. Furthermore, they introduced "Knowledge AI," a platform that easily creates AI "clones" with individual personalities and expertise, with approximately 1,800 clone AIs already created since its release in December 2025. By integrating this AI into the "Management Cockpit," the platform where management decisions are made, the AI of the President and CxOs analyzes dashboards daily and automatically generates comments and insights from a management perspective. Mr. Seki expressed confidence, stating, "Visualization has enabled appropriate pricing, leading to quantitative results such as a 5.5% improvement in NEC's standalone GP ratio from FY2022 to FY2024."
To utilize not only structured data but also approximately 30PB of unstructured data such as documents and audio within the company, NEC introduced Snowflake Intelligence. This has been further enhanced with NEC's (NGS) technology, focusing on three points:
- **Enhanced Document Understanding:** Utilizing NEC's "Diagram/Text Context Understanding Technology" to verbalize graphs and images within documents, improving AI's comprehension.
- **Enhanced Analysis and Insight Generation:** Combining with Knowledge AI to provide advanced insights through expert AI.
- **Strengthening/Extending the Semantic Layer:** Training with internal terminology and variations in notation to improve the accuracy of natural language data exploration.
Regarding future prospects, Mr. Seki explained that they are advancing the semantic layer and ontology to enable AI to deeply understand the meaning of data, make autonomous judgments, and take action. By organizing business knowledge and management indicators in a way that AI can interpret, he envisioned, "We are now creating a world where AI agents automatically execute tasks."
About Snowflake
Snowflake, as a platform for the AI era, helps organizations innovate faster and extract more value from their data. Over 13,300 customers, including hundreds of the world's largest companies, leverage Snowflake's AI Data Cloud to build, use, and share data, applications, and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI become a transformative force for everyone. Learn more at snowflake.com/ja (NYSE: SNOW).