2025-12-12
The First 100 Days of the 100-Member AI Task Force: Productivity Potential Seen Through 33 Roadmaps
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Mercari has set AI-Native as its theme for this fiscal year. To promote this organizational transformation, an AI Task Force consisting of 100+ members was established in July 2025.
Roughly 100 days later, what kinds of changes are occurring within the company, and what kind of future are we starting to see take shape?
To answer this question and get the inside story of what this transformation looks like, Mercan editorial team writer Miyu Ogasawara (@omiyu) interviewed Munehiro Asai (@mune), who leads change management for the task force and the company as a whole.
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Munehiro Asai (@mune)
Munehiro previously worked at Yahoo! on product management for GYAO! and the Yahoo! Japan homepage. He was also involved in company-wide strategy formulation and a president succession program management. Following this, he joined Mercari, where he has promoted initiatives looking at Group strategy, human capital management strategy, CEO succession, and AI utilization. He has also accumulated over 2,000 hours of experience as a professional business coach. Currently, he leads change management for the AI Task Force and the company as a whole as the head of the AI Management Office.
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Miyu Ogasawara (@omiyu)
After working in owned media and content marketing at a web marketing company, Miyu joined Mercari in 2022. Focusing on planning and editing for Mercan, she is engaged in project management and the development of communication plans for both internal and external audiences. She is also the owner of PR-related projects in her role on the AI Task Force.
Rapid changes toward becoming AI-Native
@omiyu: In July, the company announced in our business strategy presentation that AI-Native would be added to the existing theme of Back to Startup. Do you feel that the use of AI has spread throughout the organization since then?
@mune: I do. I’m sure you feel it too, but the entire company has changed remarkably. There was already momentum to utilize AI within the company even before the AI Task Force (AITF), but now every team uses AI as a regular part of their work.
Previously, there were people saying, “I’m scared to use AI because it hallucinates,” but now the discussions have shifted to, “We know AI hallucinates; how can we make use of it despite that?” There is hardly anyone who still treats AI as an “unknown entity.”
Even outside of AITF, people motivated to fully utilize AI within the company are appearing one after another. Honestly, it’s even challenging for us to keep up. (laughs) I think that shows just how fast the entire company is accelerating toward becoming AI-Native.
@omiyu: I’ve also recently gotten really into “raising” AI. AI has become like a partner in my heart. (laughs)
By teaching it my thinking style and favorite books, I’ve developed AI to the point where it gives me answers tailored to my business decision-making criteria. I’ve been getting help night after night with questions like, “How do I convey this project to this type of person?”
@mune: I know what you mean. AI is no longer just a convenient tool; it’s a partner, isn’t it? And I think this very exchange is proof of that.
A year ago, I think you would have focused on the risks and asked, “How do we deal with the issue of AI-hallucinated responses? How much information can we input?”, but now it’s “I’m really into raising AI.” (laughs)
@omiyu: True! In fact, when we incorporated AI into the article creation flow for Mercan, we were able to significantly reduce the time spent on editing. This article itself is, of course, co-authored by AI. In that sense, I feel like I’ve also become AI-Native. (laughs)
@mune: You absolutely have.
@omiyu: And I’m not the only one who feels this way. The mindset of coexisting with AI, rather than fearing it, has spread within the company, hasn’t it? What I found especially surprising was the company-wide implementation of Notion. (Editorial team note: Mercari decided to adopt Notion company-wide in August 2025, the month following the establishment of AITF, as a tool to help the company become AI-Native.)
I never thought that Mercari, which had a long-standing culture of Google Docs, would so quickly decide to migrate to Notion and even start changing how exec meetings are run, which is the core of management.
What do you think motivated the extent to which we adopted these changes?
@mune: The biggest reason is that leadership decided in earnest to take on leveraging AI and laid out a clear course of action.
Next, employees found the challenge interesting and got excited about giving it a try.
Finally, the company has been working to establish evaluation policies that appropriately reward the employees who embraced AI.
Together, these form the three essentials of change management: action, cultivation, and reward.
Potential for productivity improvements seen through roadmaps in 33 areas
@mune: AITF first divided the entire company into 33 areas and took inventory of the operations of each one. We re-examined our operations, calculated backward from our ideal vision, and identified the areas where leveraging AI would be effective. We then formulated an AI roadmap for each area by the end of September.
Mercari creates a management roadmap every year, but this is the first time that roadmaps have been drawn up to such fine levels of detail for all areas at once.
A few things have become a solid driving force for bold change management for us: Articulating our ideal state in the era of transformation with AI, identifying what key actions are necessary to reach that state, determining what blockers should be eliminated for all areas, and making this information common knowledge across the organization.
@omiyu: Which area had the highest potential for effectively leveraging AI?
@mune: As you can probably guess, it was software development. Mercari’s always had a large number of engineers, and by introducing code assist tools, developer productivity will dramatically improve. Furthermore, by making AI a core part of development work, I believe that the process of making things itself will evolve drastically.
Right now, engineers are passionately working on restructuring this process. Specifically, AI is already responsible for about 70% of code generated, resulting in a 64% increase in development speed compared to last year.
Significant transformations are also progressing in other areas like customer support.
@omiyu: In the PR area, when creating the roadmap, we started off by brainstorming and thinking outside the box. As a result, not only were we able to organize our thinking, but there were also members who envisioned ideals much larger than I had imagined, leading to many discoveries.
For us, the presence of an “enabler” was also significant. Engineers from the product side with a background in AI were assigned to all areas, leading the process from understanding our work to designing ways that we could use AI and implementing PoCs.
I think that we were able to create new synergy from these interactions between talent who wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work together if it weren’t for AI.
A world where each employee has multiple AI agents at their command
@omiyu: What kind of changes do you think lie in store for us in the future?
@mune: In the future, Mercari will have each employee commanding multiple AI agents, collaborating with AI to make faster and higher-quality decisions. Mercari has always been an organization aiming for decision-making that balances both quality and speed.
However, the multi-layered approval processes and dispersed knowledge have been factors causing delays in decisions and adjustment costs.
AI has the power to fundamentally change these structural challenges. Instantly organizing vast amounts of information as well as presenting backgrounds, evidence, and multiple options will enable the organization to make decisions faster and more accurately.
The previous division of roles where team members propose ideas and superiors decide will evolve into a style where AI agents and team members collaborate to decide.
In the context of that process, the role of managers will also change. Facing uncertainty and creating bonds of trust between people will become the essence of management in the future. AI is already responsible for automatic transcription, summarization, and sharing of meeting content, dramatically increasing transparency of information.
In the future, we will make highly confidential areas such as finance and HR “AI-readable,” while ensuring security and governance. If we make this work, I believe that the way management and leadership operate will evolve into something more dynamic and exciting.
@omiyu: I see! This is the vision we are looking at 100 days after the launch of the AI Task Force. I’m really looking forward to how we transform even further in the future.
@mune: Let’s do it!
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