Yahoo Japan is embracing AI company-wide for enhanced efficiency
It is definitely a first from a mainstream company.
The AI work conversation always seems to circle back to one thing: AI is coming for your job. It’s usually the default narrative. Understandably so, that fear isn’t baseless. We’ve seen the headlines, and in some industries, the impact is already being felt. Job losses linked to automation and AI are already everywhere. But Yahoo Japan is approaching things from a completely different angle.
Instead of cutting staff, it is demanding every single one of their 11,000 employees use generative AI daily with the goal to double productivity by 2028. It is definitely a first from a mainstream company. We have seen AI adoption encouraged, but not mandated.
The popular Japanese web portal, which also operates the messaging app LINE, wants AI to become part of the daily workflow. Not to replace workers, but to free them from mundane, time-consuming tasks like research, meeting notes, drafting documents, and managing expenses, which take up 33% of employee time according to the company.
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It’s a bold move that raises some intriguing questions. What if AI didn’t mean fewer jobs but fewer mindless tasks? Is this something to consider?
The company has already built internal tools like SeekAI to handle tasks like expense claims, pulling up data, creating agendas, summarising meetings, and proofreading reports. Without eliminating human input, these tools reduce the drag of repetitive work and create more time for thinking, discussing, and making decisions.
Plenty of companies talk about AI as a cost-cutting fix. Yahoo Japan is pushing a different model—AI as an everyday tool, baked into how people actually get work done. That’s a big difference, and it's one that could change how companies think about automation.
There’s some evidence this might be the smarter approach. In the UK, a recent Orgvue report showed that more than half of businesses that replaced staff with AI now regret it. The tech can be fast and efficient, but it’s still not great with nuance, empathy, or the context you only get from experience. When companies rely on AI alone, things get missed.
Yahoo Japan seems to understand that. By keeping humans in the loop and using AI to support rather than replace them, they’re aiming for sustainable change. Productivity goes up, but not at the cost of human judgment. If they pull this off, it could become a model for others, especially as the pressure to “do more with less” keeps rising.
The message here is that AI will not leave your job untouched. Your job itself might shift, less grunt work, more real thinking. And, if companies can follow that path thoughtfully, without gutting their teams in the process, AI might actually help people do better work.
Yahoo Japan is taking that bet.
