Zenken Hosts "NaC" — Company-Wide ChatGPT Enterprise Rollout Ceremony

Hello — Okada from Zenken’s AI department here.

On December 6, we hosted “NaC”, the company-wide ChatGPT Enterprise rollout ceremony, at our Tokyo headquarters in Azabudai Hills. The hour-long event was organized by the AI department, and thanks to help from teams across the company it ran exactly to schedule. A relief, to put it mildly.

Here is the recap we can share publicly.

Hello everyone. Last month Zenken deployed ChatGPT Enterprise to every employee. Many had not yet started using it, so we held an internal briefing to share success stories and concrete results from teams already getting value out of the tool. We will continue running events like this regularly to lift everyone’s AI skills across the company.

— Zenken (formerly Zenken Honsha) Official IR account (Securities code: 7371) (@zenken_IR), December 9, 2024

AI Native Company = NaC

We coined the term AINaC — short for AI Native Company — and the in-house nickname stuck as “NaC” (pronounced “knack”). The name was chosen from several candidates because it sounds bold and event-like, almost like the title of an artist’s live show.

The wallpaper artwork you see on the screens was produced by the design team in our Global Niche Top business unit’s production division — under a tight deadline, no less. (Our designers really are something.)

The theme: every employee is climbing the generative-AI mountain in their own way. The piece intentionally captures the abstract, still-being-defined feel of this generative-AI era. As an ad-libbed touch, the white background on the right was reworked into a silhouette of the Azabudai Hills skyline — a small detail that ties the design to where we now work.

The wallpaper comes in two color variations. We hope as many employees as possible set one of them as their PC background.

We will keep running internal — and eventually external — events under the NaC banner.

A first in Japan: ChatGPT Enterprise for every employee

According to our own count, our press release was picked up across roughly 40 outlets (including syndication) and produced 5 dedicated news articles. A sincere thank-you to every media organization that covered the announcement.

Zenken’s purpose is “creating a future that does not yet exist.” In an environment of accelerating external change, our goal is to address social challenges and grow long-term enterprise value through our marketing and global-talent businesses. We believe people are the engine of social change, which is why we put particular emphasis on talent acquisition, development, and our internal working environment.

The internet advertising market — Zenken’s core business — is being reshaped by technological change, with the rise of ChatGPT as a leading example. Adopting these new technologies early, helping employees build the skills to adapt, transforming operations with these tools, and elevating our customer touchpoints are all critical to future corporate growth.

Starting in January 2024, Zenken piloted ChatGPT Enterprise with a subset of employees, focused on improving production processes and research efficiency in the web-marketing business’s production teams. Beyond production, sales teams also explored generative-AI use cases and saw measurable impact on lead generation, proposal quality, and the development of sales talent for a more structured sales organization. An internal survey after the pilot found that 99% of participating employees felt ChatGPT Enterprise improved their work efficiency.

Because ChatGPT Enterprise has the potential to transform processes across sales, production, and back-office functions alike, we have decided to roll it out to every employee.

ITmedia AI+‘s post on X passed 25,000 impressions:

A first in Japan: web-marketing firm Zenken deploys “ChatGPT Enterprise” to every employee.

— ITmedia AI+ (@itm_aiplus), November 26, 2024

Two years, this much progress

To set the stage, we walked through how fast ChatGPT and generative AI have evolved — from recent updates back through GPT Search, Canvas, Advanced Voice, and others released in just the last few months. By the end of that section, the message was clear: humans need to keep pace with this evolution. We may have sounded like OpenAI evangelists, but the underlying point was real.

We also touched on the official launch of o1 and ChatGPT Pro, announced on the very day of our event as part of “12 Days of OpenAI”, and encouraged everyone to follow the rest of the twelve-day series alongside us.

Case studies and results

We could not share every detail on the day — we plan to publish a fuller report later — but we covered cost-savings achieved since January 2024 and productivity wins from each division, and asked everyone to give a round of applause to the teams who had carried the work. Our Okinawa office in particular has posted month-over-month gains and is now an indispensable engine for adoption across the company.

A line from one of our leaders that landed hard

“I have never seen the same job, given to two people, produce results this far apart.”

This came up in a conversation the night before the ceremony, and we used it on stage immediately.

It is a heavy line. It captures a real and growing gap between people who have learned to trust and lean on ChatGPT and those who have not — even when they are doing the same work, under the same conditions.

We are not framing this as inequality. We are all working under the same conditions; the takeaway is simply that working shoulder-to-shoulder with ChatGPT has become a meaningful skill in its own right.

The closing slot went to a team familiar to anyone at Zenken: the sales department of our Global Niche Top business unit.

To open, our presenter and the ever-supportive Senior Manager Suzuki happened to show up wearing the same outfit — which led to some friendly ribbing on stage.

The Global Niche Top sales department was the first group at Zenken to quantify what it actually means to use ChatGPT in production sales work, and the impact on our flagship business is expected to be significant. The way they have rebuilt sales motions in tandem with ChatGPT is rewriting what we thought of as the basics of sales — and the moment when those new approaches truly bloom does not feel far away.

We have multiple business units and multiple sales teams. When the front-line teams who close deals start incorporating ChatGPT into their work, two things happen: throughput that was not possible at the current headcount becomes possible, and entirely new initiatives emerge that no one would have attempted manually.

Maximizing the value we deliver to customers — together with ChatGPT

We are using ChatGPT to push past what was previously the human limit on the value we can deliver to customers, and we are approaching it from many angles.

This is not just about sales. Anyone who interacts with customers can use AI to analyze and understand their challenges and needs at a much deeper level, and reflect that depth back into their proposals. Producing more of these case studies — still relatively scarce in Japan — is, in our view, what will accelerate adoption inside the company.

At Zenken, every employee gets ChatGPT Enterprise

If you come across a Zenken job posting, please remember this: every full-time employee is issued a ChatGPT Enterprise account. The job listing itself may not always state this — feel free to ask about it during your interview.

After joining, the AI department handles account provisioning, so we will be in touch to get you set up.

Bonus

Our new office has one stage area that is the only shoes-off zone on the floor. Behind a giant screen, you get an open view of Tokyo Tower.

From the stage you can see the entire office — an ideal setup for events like NaC.

To either side, sunken-style desks (think horigotatsu) sit just off the stage. People work there day to day, and sometimes eat lunch there too.

It is the only no-shoes area in the office, but I have yet to see anyone actually sprawled out on it. Lounging there while playing with ChatGPT for some lateral thinking sounds like a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Plans for our December and January 2025 ChatGPT initiatives are already in motion. More to come.