At Street Smart Tokyo 2025, a panel of Japanese visionaries gathered to discuss a powerful windfall that comes from outsourcing ERP maintenance: more space to plan for AI.
The event offered a rare window into how some of Japan’s most established companies are navigating the high-stakes challenge of modernizing IT while balancing risk and cost in a business landscape where innovation can no longer be postponed.
With SAP’s ECC end-of-life fast approaching, the panel, composed of senior leaders from across various industries, was a particular highlight of the event as it shared how offloading system upkeep to third-party support gave their teams room to experiment and push forward with AI at their own speed.
In a conversation refreshingly free of vendor pressure and buzzwords, the discussion focused on real-world execution of how each company is navigating modernization and doing so on their current ERP release. More importantly, the Japanese industry giants explained how they are preparing for AI, from building literacy programs to launching their own internal LLMs.
AI from the inside
The first featured company, founded in the late 1800s and now one of the leading food processors in the world, shared how they are working together as an organization to capture the benefits of AI.
Since 2020, the company’s IT Strategy Department, has been tasked with leading all digital operations across the enterprise, from core system modernization and information security to an enterprise-wide DX initiative.
In 2023, the company shifted its SAP system maintenance to Rimini Street, freeing internal teams to focus on transformation immediately. This allowed them to begin testing generative AI internally. The first use case was, as the general manager of IT explained it, modest but effective: a new chatbot for the IT helpdesk able to field up to 60 queries per day.
By 2024, they had expanded into Microsoft 365 Copilot, set ground rules around data handling and risk and started building knowledge around its usage. The company invited employee participation, seeing a 300-seat Copilot training fill up quickly. Later in the year, they introduced AI Evangelist workshops, equipping volunteers with business use case scenarios. The satisfactory rate was a whopping 97%.
The GM stated that his company’s innovation goals are about growing a sense of AI maturity and laying the foundations for automation efficacy when implemented on a wide scale.
AI can be DIY
Where one business is investing in its AI literacy, another is revisiting how AI can save the company a finite resource: time.
Founded in Hiroshima in the early 1900’s, it employs nearly 5000 people to support its global operations. With consolidated net sales in the billions, this company is a mass-market titan. But unlike most in its weight-class, the company is in no rush to replace its current SAP systems.
During the discussion, a senior leader overseeing the company’s ERP and IT modernization strategy, shared how it shifted SAP ECC 6.0 maintenance to Rimini Street in 2019 with the goal of avoiding the looming end-of-life support deadline.
That decision bought them time, but more importantly, it freed up resources once tied up in system maintenance to what the panelist called “mode 2 initiatives.” These were things like RPA, citizen development and applied data utilization. The company now plans to keep its current SAP system running until 2034, and the senior leader even hinted it could possibly add another 6 years now that Rimini Street announced it will support all ECC 6.0 and S/4HANA on-prem releases through 2040. That sort of long-view planning on existing systems is increasingly enticing for enterprises today, and it’s given the company the runway to start experimenting with generative AI.
Internally, the business has even launched its own AI. The senior leader explained how it acts as a reading and writing assistant that can parse documents, summarize reports and analyze data. The panelist was clear that they’re still deep in the trail-and-error phase with Retrieval-Augmented-Generations (RAG) tuning and working toward more ambitious uses like actual conversations about the data.
This big company is using its newfound breathing room to build durable AI that is useful right now. By remaining on its current systems for the next decade or more, the panelist is equipping his company with something very valuable in the AI world: a sense of control over it.
Turning AI curiosity into capability
The third featured panelist explained that AI might be best looked at as a cultural shift.
The general manager of the DX Promotion Office at this medical equipment instruments manufacturer described how the company turned downtime into innovation.
Founded in the early 1900’s, and now with nearly 1,000 employees and billions in annual revenue, it sits in that familiar middle space, big enough to feel the pressure to modernize but pragmatic enough to resist vendor lock-in.
Taking the stage to give an update on his company’s generative AI journey, his detailed walk-through of how they structured a phased rollout highlighted the value of prioritizing literacy over velocity.
This began in 2019, right as the company faced pressure to modernize its SAP environment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. By moving SAP maintenance to Rimini Street, the business freed up internal bandwidth, allowing the GM and his team to shift focus from system upkeep to digital exploration. This transition is what ultimately laid the groundwork for what would become the company’s structured AI literacy and DX initiatives.
In 2023, the company then launched its internal Generative AI Study Group with 16 hand-selected members from six departments. It was built around lectures and hackathons designed to answer the question, “what does useful AI look like?”
By 2024, the study group evolved into a formal General AI Force, expanding to 50 members with the mission to create prompt templates, identify internal data assets for RAG workflows and structure AI literacy across the organization. Over 90 use cases and 215 prompts were developed for internal testing and rollout. The panelist emphasized that they were still working through the challenge of turning curiosity into sustained operational change, but what a first step. Their long-term ambition is to integrate generative AI into the company’s products and services.
Notably, the speaker acknowledged that the real challenge now is scale, not just in tools but in understanding, adopting and sustaining AI. For him, AI isn’t just a product to be installed, but a practice to be built.
When maintenance moves aside, innovation moves in
What united these titans of industry on the Street Smart Tokyo 2025 stage was more than their decision to move ERP maintenance to Rimini Street, it was what they did with the freedom they gained afterwards.
The panelists inspired audience members with their candid homegrown approaches to AI adoption with existing mission-critical systems and showed that innovation can be harnessed without cloud “transformations” or full-scale migrations.
Where some in the enterprise world are poring over vendor roadmaps and promises, these Japanese decision-makers are breaking the status quo. They’re setting an example for other IT leaders that when used with literacy and long-term thinking, AI isn’t tethered to or dependent on a single ERP vendor.
The smart decision wasn’t about chasing the best software, it was about freeing up the time and resources to make the most out of what you already have. Above all, it was about taking charge, setting a vision, and bringing teams across the organization to participate in ushering meaningful change.
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