Panasonic Connect
Panasonic Connect reports 788,000 hours saved in a year with its ConnectAI staff assistant
Panasonic Connect, a Japanese industrial and technology company, gave about 11,800 domestic employees an in-house AI assistant called ConnectAI. For fiscal 2025 the company reports 788,000 hours saved, equal to 3.4% of total working hours.
Key figures
Copied exactly from the sources. Copy any figure with its citation.
788,000
hours (78.8万時間 in the Japanese release)
Working hours saved in fiscal 2025, as estimated by the company1
3.4%
Share of total annual working hours saved in fiscal 20251
What it took
Cost, team size and timeline were not disclosed in the sources.
The problem
Panasonic Connect wanted to raise office productivity, build AI skills across its workforce and reduce the risk of staff using unapproved AI tools on their own. It set these three goals when it started using generative AI at work in February 2023.
What they built
ConnectAI is an in-house assistant that answers staff questions and helps with drafting. The company says it is based on a large language model. A 2024 trade article names OpenAI as the source of that model; the 2026 release does not name it. Over time the assistant gained access to internal documents through retrieval, a method where the tool looks up company files before it answers. It also gained functions for minutes, code, log analysis, proposals and design documents. In fiscal 2026 the company added slide generation in its own design templates.
How they did it
The company rolled the assistant out to its domestic workforce, now described as about 11,800 people. It customised the screen to guide good prompts, with 15 sample prompts for everyday tasks, and added a prompt-correction function in June 2024. In April 2024 it opened an answer function over confidential quality-control material, 630 items and 11,743 pages, and the tool shows the source of each answer so staff can check it. Next it built a company data base, the Connect Corpus, that joins documents with data from 50 internal business systems.
Results
For fiscal 2025 the company reports 788,000 hours saved, equal to 3.4% of total annual working hours. It also reports 3.61 million uses, 33 minutes saved per use and a monthly unique user rate of 61%. It says hours saved doubled and uses rose 1.6 times from the previous year, which it ties to growth in personal tasks such as minutes, code and proposals. In the first year, June 2023 to May 2024, it reported 186,000 hours saved. It also reported no information leaks or copyright problems in the first 16 months. The company now aims to link the assistant to sales and finance data and to use AI agents.
All reported figures
| Measure | Figure | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| Working hours saved in fiscal 2025, as estimated by the company | 788,000 hours (78.8万時間 in the Japanese release)1 | |
| Share of total annual working hours saved in fiscal 2025 | 3.4%1 | |
| ConnectAI uses in fiscal 2025 | 3.61 million (361万回 in the Japanese release)1 | |
| Time saved per use in fiscal 2025 | 33 minutes1 | |
| Monthly unique user rate in fiscal 2025 | 61%1 | |
| Hours saved in the first year of use, June 2023 to May 2024 | 186,000 hours (18.6万時間 in the Japanese article)2 |
Lessons for your project
Measure time saved per use and track it every year. Panasonic Connect reports both uses and minutes per use, so it can see whether gains come from volume or depth.
Watch which tasks drive the gain. The company links growth to personal tasks such as minutes, code, log analysis and proposal drafts, so support those uses with templates.
Invest in company data, not only in the AI tool. Panasonic Connect says the data the AI draws on matters as much as the AI itself, and has been joining internal data since 2023.
Start with documents of clear value, such as quality rules, and show the source of each answer so staff can check it.
Caveats
- All figures are the company's own estimates, announced in its press release. The hours saved are based on the company's analysis of usage data, and the 2024 article says time saved was asked of employees.
- The 2026 release does not name a model. Only the 2024 trade article says the assistant (the same ConnectAI service, in use since February 2023) was built on a large language model from OpenAI, with no model version given. The sources do not say whether the model is still the same in 2026.
- Employee numbers differ between the sources: about 12,400 in the 2024 article and about 11,800 in the 2026 release.
- The release gives a 2030 target of saving 10% of working hours with AI agents. That is a plan, not a result.
- Both sources are in Japanese. The English figures here follow the Japanese numbers (万 means ten thousand).
Sources
- パナソニック コネクト、AI活用で総労働時間の3.4％削減 AIエージェントの活用を拡大し2030年に10％削減を目指す
Panasonic Newsroom Japan · 2026-07-29 · Press release · news.panasonic.com
- パナソニック コネクト、生成AI導入1年で労働時間18.6万時間を削減
BCN+R · 2024-06-26 · News · bcnretail.com
Summarized in our own words from the sources above. Spotted an error? See corrections.