The Surge of AI in Enhancing Business Efficiency in Japan: Riding the Wave of the 'Year of AI Agents'!

Voices are increasingly suggesting that 2025 will mark the 'Year of AI Agents'. An AI agent refers to an AI system that perceives its environment and autonomously makes decisions (reasoning, planning, execution) to achieve specific goals.

Until now, generative AI has been creating specific outputs based on prompts (command sentences) input by humans. However, in the coming era, AI agents will formulate the optimal implementation plans for projects conceived by humans. These agents will select the most suitable generative AI software, create and input prompts, thereby drastically reducing human labor hours and eventually only requiring humans for ideation.

AI agents convert tasks envisioned by humans into concrete actions, thinking and adapting on the fly to achieve goals. It would be a waste to view them merely as replacements for RPA (Robotic Process Automation) tools, like previous generative AIs. The skill to delegate work to them as if they were employees you hired is becoming essential. In other words, employees and managers alike must manage work with this perspective to fully leverage AI agents' capabilities, indicating a significant shift in the skills required for professionals in the future.

OpenAI's 'Deep Research' is an AI agent that autonomously conducts internet searches and integrates with external tools, extending the capabilities of ChatGPT. Even with vague instructions like 'Conduct a market analysis for our company', it autonomously searches for related news, industry reports, and competitor activities, analyzes the gathered information, extracts key points, creates reports and graphs, and even evaluates the results. This technology is being aggressively adopted by IT startups.

Trends in Labor Productivity (per capita) Among OECD Countries