How Hitachi is increasing HR efficiency by 70% with Ema

Hitachi is a global conglomerate employing nearly 400,000 people worldwide. Its operations span IT services, industrial manufacturing, healthcare, automotive systems, financial services, and energy solutions, supported by an extensive network of subsidiaries and business units across the globe.

Innovation and operational efficiency sit at the heart of how Hitachi runs. As an early mover on enterprise AI, the company launched the first phase of its Agentic AI journey with Ema across five distinct business units under Hitachi Digital, a shared HR services arm supporting more than 40,000 employees.

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. Each of the five business units operated autonomously on distinct HR systems such as ServiceNow, SAP, Workday, and ADP, creating fragmented processes, limited interoperability, and significant operational burden on the centralized HR team.

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 through robotic process automation (RPA), basic chatbots, and even internally developed AI solutions were limited in their capabilities — unable to reason over complex documents, automate comprehensive workflows, or scale across departments and 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.

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.

Internally code-named "Skye," Ema's AI agent was initially rolled out to employees of Hitachi Digital, comprised of five distinct companies under the Hitachi group. Skye's mission was clear, to streamline HR workflows from hire to retire across Hitachi's conglomerate of businesses.

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 can tackle 20+ use cases across the employee lifecycle, including onboarding, training, growth and management, benefits, and offboarding. In addition, EmaFusion™ combines over 100 large language and domain-specific models — a mixture-of-experts approach that responds accurately to a wide range of queries while optimizing costs.

Here's how Ema solved 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, without additional infrastructural overhead.
• Enhanced security, compliant with leading industry standards: Ema ensured compliance with global standards like SOC2, ISO42001, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001 and more. Mirroring Hitachi's existing LDAP permissions structure, Ema maintained strict adherence to organizational data access policies.

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 Microsoft Teams and Google Chat. Ema utilized advanced document ingestion techniques, OCR, APIs, and database integrations — and its Generative Workflow Engine™ streamlined customization by region, employee role, and company policy. Regular feedback and human-in-the-loop training ensured Ema continuously improved, swiftly evolving from simple query resolution to managing complex workflows such as leave applications, claims, and reimbursements autonomously.

This is our first baby step in a bold 3-year journey to transform the end to end employee experience (hire to retire) with a network of AI-powered HR agents. Skye is designed to make HR simpler, faster, and more agile and it only gets better from here.

Vamsi Krishna Aavula

VP HR Tech and Transformation, Hitachi Digital

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

• <8 weeks time to market
• 70% increase in efficiency
• 30% month-over-month drop in HR ticket volume
• Query resolution shifted from a few days to minutes
• 90%+ accuracy rate, reinforcing Hitachi's trust in Ema's capabilities

Beyond the significant anticipated cost savings, these gains gave Hitachi the confidence to further embed AI-driven processes into its operational framework. Hitachi will expand AI into more HR tasks and automate their process from hire to retire across their business operations globally.