How Hitachi is increasing HR efficiency by 70% with Ema

About Hitachi

Hitachi is a global conglomerate employing nearly 400,000 people worldwide. With operations across multiple sectors including IT services, industrial manufacturing, healthcare, automotive systems, financial services, and energy solutions, Hitachi manages an extensive network of subsidiaries and business units globally.

The company continuously invests in improving operational efficiency and innovation. Due to its vast scale and diversity, Hitachi encountered notable complexity in managing HR operations. To tackle this challenge, Hitachi initiated the first phase of its Agentic AI implementation with five distinct business units, a shared HR services arm supporting over 40,000 employees.

Each of these business units operated autonomously, utilizing distinct HR systems such as ServiceNow, SAP, Workday, and ADP. The existence of diverse systems created fragmented processes, limited interoperability, and placed significant operational burdens on Hitachi’s centralized HR team.

The HR Challenge

With thousands of new hires each year and employees spread across the US, Japan, Europe, and beyond, Hitachi’s HR organization encountered significant pain points. Onboarding new employees could take up to 15 days, involving manual paperwork and fragmented communications across departments.

This made work for the HR Ops team more difficult:

• Fragmented tools, global teams: With its extensive workforce of 40,000+ employees distributed globally, fragmented systems and siloed processes, Hitachi’s centralized HR operations team was burdened by repetitive, time-consuming queries that could take days to resolve.
• HR support was strained: Employees with questions about policies, leave, or expense claims often had to dig through PDFs or submit helpdesk tickets and wait days for answers.
• The learning curve was becoming increasingly steep: Training HR Ops across multiple systems and policies compounded these inefficiencies, impacting productivity.
• Traditional GenAI tools didn’t suffice: Initial efforts to enhance operational efficiency through robotic process automation (RPA), basic chatbots, and even internally developed AI solutions didn’t suffice. These tools were limited in their capabilities, unable to reason complex documents, comprehensive workflow automation, and scalability across departments or regions.
• Time-consuming approach, impacting productivity: Consulting firms recommended system consolidation, but this traditional approach would have entailed costly and lengthy transformations spanning 2 to 3 years-—an impractical option given the immediate need for operational agility and productivity gains.

Hitachi’s IT and HR leaders considered traditional Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or building in-house chatbots, but these approaches struggled with the complexity of end-to-end processes and required significant maintenance.

They needed a more adaptive, agentic AI solution capable of understanding context, handling diverse workflows, and improving over time all within an enterprise-grade security framework.

The solution - Ema’s Agentic AI Platform (Skye)

Internally code-named “Skye,” Ema’s AI agent was initially rolled to employees of Hitachi Digital, comprised of five distinct companies under Hitachi group of companies.

Skye’s mission was clear - to streamline HR workflows from hire to retire across Hitachi’s conglomerate of businesses.

Why Ema?

Ema’s platform could handle entire workflows end-to-end rather than just automating single tasks. At the core of Ema is a Generative Workflow Engine™ that can break down a complex HR process into actionable subtasks and execute them in sequence.

Skye, Hitachi’s HR companion built on Ema’s Agentic AI platform, can tackle 20+ use cases across the employee lifecycle (hire to retire), including onboarding, training, growth and management, benefits, and offboarding. In addition, EmaFusion™ combines over 100 large language and domain-specific models, combining the best models for each subtask to maximize accuracy and efficiency.

This mixture-of-experts approach allows the AI to respond accurately to a wide range of queries while optimizing costs.

Here’s how Ema was able to solve Hitachi’s challenges:

• Ability to understand structured and unstructured data: Ema required minimal data consolidation, leveraging its robust reasoning engine to manage tribal and unstructured data effortlessly.
• Increased operational agility: Pre-built integrations facilitated seamless connectivity with over 200 applications, including ServiceNow, Jira, Okta, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat, enhancing Hitachi's operational agility without additional infrastructural overhead.

Enhanced security and compliant with leading industry standards: Ema ensured compliance and security with global standards like SOC2, ISO42001, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001 and more. Mirroring Hitachi’s existing LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) permissions structure, Ema maintained strict adherence to organizational data access policies, eliminating concerns around privacy and security.

Rapid implementation and rollout with 10x speed - go live in less than 8 weeks

The implementation involved a phased and structured rollout. Ema’s AI Employees were deployed simultaneously across Azure and Google Cloud environments, integrated directly into primary communication channels Microsoft Teams and Google Chat for Hitachi’s group of companies.

Ema utilized advanced document ingestion techniques, incorporating optical character recognition (OCR), APIs, and database integrations. Its Generative Workflow Engine™ streamlined customization, allowing rapid personalization by region, employee role, and company policy specifics.

Regular feedback and human-in-the-loop training ensured Ema continuously improved, swiftly evolving from simple query resolution tasks to managing complex workflows such as leave applications, claims, and reimbursements all autonomously.

Ema’s Impact

Ema’s impact was immediate and measurable. With more than 40,000+ Hitachi employees globally using Ema, the average query resolution time dramatically decreased from days to mere minutes. Thus enhancing employee satisfaction and significantly boosting operational efficiency.

Beyond the significant anticipated cost savings, Hitachi saw a 30% month-over-month drop in HR ticket volume and average query resolution time shift from a few days to minutes. Ema consistently achieved a 90%+ accuracy rate, reinforcing Hitachi’s trust in its capabilities and to further embed AI-driven processes into Hitachi’s operational framework.

Hitachi will expand AI into more HR tasks and automate their process from hire to retire across their business operations globally.

Ema’s AI employees are showing impact in leading businesses and are built to handle scale and complexity. Ema helps businesses increase employee satisfaction, reduce costs and boost operational efficiency.

Hire Ema today and transform your HR operations.