How your organization can harness the transformative power of GenAI to innovate and lead

Generative AI (GenAI) is a transformative force that’s reshaping the world at an unprecedented pace. Consumers are no longer just embracing this technology — they’re expecting it. From personalized shopping experiences to AI-generated content that blurs the line between human and machine creativity, GenAI is becoming an integral part of daily life.

But, this isn’t just about consumer preferences; it’s also about infrastructure, investment and policy. Countries and organizations are pouring resources into AI and GenAI development.

NTT DATA’s Global GenAI Report finds that more than 60% of organizations believe GenAI will be a game changer within two years. Almost 70% are optimistic about the technology and nearly two-thirds plan to invest significantly in GenAI in the next two years.

According to our report, 64% of c-suite executives expect a major transformation in their industry in 2025, thanks to investment in GenAI. In healthcare, for example, AI is assisting in everything from diagnostics to drug discovery. In transportation, smart traffic systems and autonomous vehicles are redefining urban mobility.

Across industries, organizations plan to significantly increase investment in GenAI in the next two years — by as much as 94% in manufacturing, 91% in energy and utilities and 90% in healthcare.

At NTT DATA, we are accelerating our GenAI training initiatives so that all 200,000 employees globally receive fundamental training and we have at least 30,000 certified experts by 2026.

We’ve also started offering tsuzumi, an advanced large language model (LLM) developed by the NTT Group on various platforms. It has advanced capabilities and a relatively low cost of learning and tuning. This is because it has fewer parameters than other publicly available, cloud-based LLMs. The model supports English and Japanese and allows for inferencing on a single GPU or CPU and can be trained for specific industries or organizations.

Apart from the financial benefits, tsuzumi is, therefore, ideal for use in local, small-scale and on-premises environments, such as hospitals or contact centres or where there are barriers to handling confidential information in the cloud. The model’s high speed of inference also makes it well-suited to services that depend on quick responses.

These lightweight models are finding a niche as specialist or domain-specific applications, while large-scale LLMs still act as generalists in different contexts.

Additionally, there is a sustainability benefit to developing and training lightweight GenAI models with low power needs at a time when the data centre resource demands of GenAI are soaring. Increasing the number of parameters in a model, such as tsuzumi, would improve performance, but also consume more energy and computational resources. Instead, we have made an improvement in tsuzumi’s Japanese language-processing ability by improving the quality and quantity of its Japanese training data.

We’re applying AI and GenAI in the market in other ways too. In the retail sector, for example, we’ve created an AI-driven sales assistant for an international cosmetics brand. By offering product suggestions tailored to customers’ needs, the assistant has reduced the time it takes for customers to add five products to their shopping carts from an average of six minutes to 37 seconds.

We’re also working with a global automotive company in the field of mobility and AI-enabled telecommunications to help prevent traffic accidents. The company is making safety and security a top priority for its software-defined vehicles. It needs a new infrastructure that includes high-speed, high-quality communication, powerful computing resources and AI models that can collect and process vast amounts of information. To achieve this, we are jointly developing a mobility AI platform.

In healthcare, we’re changing lives by using natural language processing to analyze the unstructured electronic health records of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. This allows healthcare practitioners to identify the characteristics of patients who are resistant to medication and, ultimately, improve care.

In the next 12 months, organizations will progress from scattered experimentation to more focused and precise GenAI ventures — especially as they transform back-office and middle-office workflows and create new digital products and services with the potential to scale.

The spotlight is now on a Smart AI Agent that can complete complex workflows with minimal human supervision. They can act autonomously in a specific environment to make decisions, learn from and adapt to changing circumstances and interact with users or other systems. In a contact centre, for example, they can troubleshoot customer issues in real-time based on proprietary knowledge bases and even implement process improvements and automation for a better customer experience.

Meanwhile, small language models (SLMs) are improving the precision and efficacy of analytics and actions, including in edge AI, and multimodal solutions are making it possible to handle multiple data formats simultaneously. And, because GenAI enables fast and accurate communication across languages, it makes productive collaboration between different parts of the world more efficient than ever.

These exciting developments show that we are now living in the 'Intelligent Age,' where technology is the main driver of change and disruption. Organizations that rethink how they do business with the help of GenAI will transform business and society while contributing to a collective leap forward.

This is imperative at a time when many advanced economies have ageing populations and a growing shortage of IT skills. GenAI ushers in a shift towards knowledge-intensive and AI-powered work environments by automating key functions and freeing up employees to apply their creativity and expertise to higher-level tasks. Redefining labour for the future in this way alleviates workforce pressures and supports innovation, contributing to a more efficient and equitable global economy.

It is the responsibility of every business leader to take up the challenge to help their organizations adapt to the ongoing and far-reaching changes in their industries and to capitalize on the valuable opportunities being created.