Founded in 1917, Taisei Corporation is one of Japan's leading construction companies. For more than a century, it has delivered projects in Japan and around the world, helping to build the social infrastructure that supports modern life.

Recently, a new question has come into focus: What should Taisei build next? The company began to ask whether its most important investment should be not only in buildings and infrastructure, but in people.

People-First AI Adoption Strategy

With this in mind, Taisei's HR organization decided to introduce ChatGPT Enterprise as a cornerstone of its talent development strategy. Rather than treating generative AI as a simple productivity tool, Taisei positioned it as a technology for expanding human potential. Employees now use AI to push past their own perceived limits, reshape how they work, and unlock meaningful efficiency gains.

Since rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise, Taisei has achieved:

  • 90% weekly active usage of ChatGPT Enterprise
  • More than 5.5 hours of work saved per employee each week
  • 3,300 custom GPTs created
  • 3,800 projects created
  • 99% of users want to continue using ChatGPT Enterprise

The "Middle Out" Approach

For the company-wide rollout, Taisei adopted an approach it calls "Middle Out," combining direction from leadership with energy from the front lines. This concept was proposed by Kenta Nukazawa, Assistant Manager HR Development/GenAI Project Lead, based on his experience working closely with both on-site teams and HR systems.

"Decisions made at the top do not automatically move people on the ground," Nukazawa explains. "At the same time, passion at the front line alone rarely gains full support from management. You need someone in the middle who can stand between the two and translate both sides."

The hardest part of bringing AI into an organization is not the technology, but aligning how people feel about it. Based on this model, Taisei designed a wide range of initiatives including training programs, internal events, communities of practice, and hackathons.

Safety and Trust First

As AI started to appear in more day-to-day work, a new challenge emerged: how to handle information scattered across the company in a way that was both useful and safe. Working closely with the Information Planning Department, Nukazawa helped design a governance framework. The team introduced access controls, organized usage logs, built an education program, and set up regular monitoring.

"I kept asking myself whether people would really feel safe using this," Nukazawa recalls. "That question mattered more to me than how useful the system might look on paper." The goal was to create understanding, not just rules.

Measurable Impact and Cultural Shift

Younger employees are using AI to deliver work on par with their more experienced colleagues, and veteran employees are beginning to recognize the value of AI in developing the next generation. It is now common to hear comments such as, "Without ChatGPT, my work just does not move forward."

Working with AI is steadily becoming a normal part of life at Taisei, not a special exception. At the center of this journey is a human-centered model for using AI where technology extends human potential rather than replacing it.

Taisei now wants to share this human-centered approach with the construction industry and, eventually, with society at large, making this way of working available to others.

Source: OpenAI Blog