At the start of our twelfth fiscal year of operations, Mercari embraced Back to Startup and AI-Native. These topics demand fundamental changes in our organization and product that use AI as the cornerstone of all of our work. At the same time, they give us opportunities to re-engage with the spirit of high-speed trial and error and the bold challenges that we experienced as a startup.

What is the future that Masato Yamamoto (@mark), Senior Vice President of Japan Business, Director of Merpay, Inc., and Director of Mercoin, Inc. envisions as he navigates the company through this epic transformation? We sat down with him to take a deep dive into this topic.

*This article was composed and written using AI tools based on an audio recording of the interview. This English version was translated from Japanese using a custom generative AI model interface trained using Mercari style guides, glossaries, and past Mercan articles.

The strategic implications of Back to Startup and AI-Native

—Mercari has embraced Back to Startup and AI-Native as topics to pursue this fiscal year. Could you share what each of these means to you?

Looking back on human history, there have been technological revolutions that have drastically changed the rules of society and business such as the steam engine, the printing press, the internet, and smartphones. I recognize AI as another such innovation that will bring a similar level of change. My sense is that AI will be a game changer that rewrites the rules of a lot of industries, and I think it will be a question of how to deal with that.

When Mercari was founded, our platform was built around smartphone technology. We developed our app as a service based on smartphone technology and achieved rapid growth through a network effect. However as we enter the age of AI, even Mercari’s hard-earned strengths could lose their meaning overnight. What I mean is that I see this as a great opportunity for us to take on companies and services that have become dominant by following the established rules of business and society.

We believe that at this pivotal moment, as AI continues to take off, it’s essential for us to focus boldly on this technology. That’s why we use the term “AI-Native”—because AI is more than just a tool; it has the potential to fundamentally reshape the operating systems that support everything we do. We don’t just use AI. We rethink everything with AI in mind. That is the meaning behind the term AI-Native.

I also think that AI-Native is highly compatible with Back to Startup, which I mentioned earlier. It involves maintaining the boldness of a startup company and a challenging spirit without being constrained by what we’ve built so far. This is what Back to Startup means, and we need an AI-Native stance to accelerate this concept. Therefore, we can say that these messages are not independent of each other, but rather interrelated.

How AI is changing the definition of professional

—How will conventional notions of what it means to be a professional change at AI-native organizations?

I think we are standing at a crossroads where we clearly must make changes. The most significant change we will see is that the roles and responsibilities that each person should have will be less rigid and instead expand. For example, in future AI-native organizations, engineers will need to collaborate with AI in a wide range of fields such as those once exclusive to PMs and management, and they will also have to look at numerical data analysis. Qualities like these will be valued highly.

In the past, there was a project where we were told that it would take 10 people to create a certain feature in six months, but thanks to engineers working with AI, the project proceeded ahead of schedule and without adding a single person.

This isn’t simply about using AI; rather, it’s about creating an environment where engineers can independently define business goals, identify challenges, and take them on—including challenges in areas that were once the responsibility of management or product managers.

It’s an excellent example of how the process of thinking while creating, and creating while thinking, can lead you straight to your goal.

The ability to judge what will work is our last bastion

—As the things we can do using AI increases, what sort of value is there that only humans can provide?

I believe a specialist brings two things to the table: the ability to execute tasks effectively and the ability to judge what works. In other words, they have the ability to distinguish winning strategies.

Going forward, while AI will be entrusted with handling tasks, we believe that the skills for judging whether something will work, as well as for providing direction, will not disappear—instead, demand for these skills will only continue to increase.

—Do you have any specific examples that illustrate the importance of human judgment?

Well, to give one example, there was a project to use AI in Mercari’s UI review process. Conventionally, the process tended to be that PMs would think about what they wanted their team to work on, UX designers would make those ideas concrete, and then people would discuss these end products and take them away to work on them.

For this project, people input their ideas and discussions as prompts, and AI would output suggestions for user interfaces (UI). Even if you don’t have the skills to design a UI yourself, if you are thinking about what you want to create and what your winning strategy is, you can quickly create designs based on the verbalized content. We can fundamentally change the compartmentalized nature of manufacturing processes and the inherent slowness that results from specialized labor.

The speed of creating mockups has increased significantly thanks to AI, but there is little point in sending largely incorrect instructions to AI, as it simply creates unnecessary items quickly. Therefore, I believe it’s important to create an environment where those who can identify the most accurate and efficient path to the goal are able to take greater initiative.

The era of self-collaboration

—Will collaboration within our organization change?

Conventionally, collaboration has mainly involved multiple people working together on a specific project, but most of these cases have also centered around routine task execution. If we could delegate most of these execution-level tasks to AI, the amount of work people would have to do themselves would be significantly reduced.

However, since each professional possesses their own knowledge base pertaining to strategic decision-making and appropriate evaluation, higher-level communication and collaboration will continue to be crucial.

Going forward, we anticipate a fundamental shift in how people collaborate. Collaboration at the planning and strategy proposal phases will be even more crucial, and more people will take part in discussions and communications regarding strategic direction and suitability. However, the number of people actually involved in the production phase will be minimal.

—How much of a productivity increase do you expect to see?

With regard to individual productivity improvements, we believe that we need to work toward achieving an order of magnitude increase of 10 times or 100 times, rather than a level of improvement of two or three times.

Using AI, projects that used to require around 100 people can now be completed by a few people involved in decision-making. This eliminates inefficient communication, decision-making processes, coordination tasks, meetings, and more, and creates an environment where individuals and small teams can make decisions at extremely high speeds.

Recruitment requiring transformational leadership

—How will hiring criteria change in the AI-Native era?

I think the coming era presents new members with an extremely good opportunity. At a time when fundamental game changers seem to pop up everywhere, we should not rely too heavily on our existing methods and accumulated knowledge. There’s a strong need for innovative ideas and proposals, such as strategies that Mercari should implement when considering new ideas from scratch, or a direction for feature development when considering AI infrastructure.

That’s why we want to create an environment grounded in an AI-native mindset to allow employees to proactively make proposals, regardless of their tenure or experience. We expect people to contribute maximum value to the transformation of Mercari based on their expertise and experience, rather than being hesitant because they’re new or because the topic is outside their expertise.

—What kind of talent are you looking for exactly?

Even in our hiring strategies, since it’s difficult to achieve the necessary innovative mindset with talent that leans too heavily on conventional viewpoints and methods, it is important to find talent that can conceptualize completely from scratch and demonstrate innovative leadership. These points are more about mindset and values than technical skills.

The rise of AI has allowed us to accelerate our pace of development. For instance, where we might have been limited to developing about 10 services a year, we can now create 100 within the same time frame. I sometimes get asked if we could also get by with one-tenth of our current headcount, but I think that way of looking at things is nonsense.

With a tenfold increase in work capacity, we will be able to change what the organization works on and how it works. I think this means that, instead of sticking to established conventions, we will be able to work on game changers that rewrite the rules of the past.

Shifting into AI-Native organizational operations

—How do you feel about transforming organizational processes themselves?

The AI Task Force is now comprehensively reviewing all of the business processes we currently use. It is important to use AI as a tool that takes care of individual tasks in our place. However, a more essential goal is to use an AI infrastructure to fundamentally redesign our entire business process, rather than use it to handle a list of individual elements.

Decision-making and management are also elements of our business processes. If the AI platform can streamline tasks that once required multiple steps, we can revise our delegation of authority and create a mechanism that allows tasks to be completed almost instantly. We also believe it’s necessary to make decisions to boldly change management methods and approval processes—without fear of major changes. As such, we expect AI-Native management and decision-making will be significantly different from what has existed to date.

—In closing, could you share what you think are the most important points to keep in mind in order to maintain an AI-native stance?

Promoting an AI-Native mindset will significantly expand the scope of the work we can do compared to what we have been able to do up until now. Fundamental changes in how we work should naturally follow, and it is crucial that we move in that direction. Assuming we will have the current headcount and customer base in the time to come, the number of work tasks we can carry out will increase dramatically. That’s why I strongly believe that we should make the most of our expanded potential.

However, the core value that human beings should have is the ability to make appropriate decisions. I think our decision-making abilities are something that cannot be handed over to AI as they represent our most important human skill and will continue to be in demand in the future.