Case Study: AI Training for the HR Division of Fujitsu Limited

The premise was already there: we knew we had to start using AI. Within our recruiting work, I kept wrestling with how to bring AI in, and how to create that first opening.

Looking through all the posts and news out there, a lot of it felt like people saying nice-sounding things about AI, and it never quite landed with me.

Then I came across your LinkedIn posts and thought, “these are the posts of someone who actually does this.” Because the tips came from real use, they spoke directly to our work on the hiring side, and it felt grounded, feet firmly on the ground. That caught my interest, so I reached out.

I think I have changed. Before the training, I was at the level of having heard of ChatGPT. I would play with it a little, but that was about the extent of it (laughs).

But I realized there is truly so much AI can do. I used to think AI was something that handed everything back in a single exchange. It isn’t. A mindset took root in me that AI is something you nurture and grow.

I feel I learned not just how to use AI, but how to engage with it.

More than “consulting,” I think the closer expression for what we did is “running alongside us.” You didn’t teach AI at a surface level. You engaged with the underlying problems first, and taught AI on top of that understanding. Rather than delivering a training program, it felt like you searched out our problems with us and cleared them one by one, and our progress kept accelerating.

To put it another way, not a consultant but a running partner. Same eye level, same pace, simply showing us how to take the next half step, the next full step. You didn’t apply some ready-made plan from the start. You designed it only after properly understanding our situation.

It did feel like you ran alongside us. You stayed close. You met us at our eye level, but without lowering yourself all the way to it: you showed us the half step ahead and gave us a genuinely higher vantage point. That made a big difference.

The biggest difference is the stance. Seminars and video courses tend to speak from the position of the one doing the teaching. From our side, it never feels like they come all the way over to where we are.

You began by standing on our side and understanding us. It was less about delivering something and more about moving forward together. That was the decisive difference.

That is why some members of the recruiting team ended up subscribing to the paid version of Perplexity, and others started trying Claude. They felt they could give it a go precisely because that stance was there.

With generic, pre-packaged content, it is hard to make it your own. This time, it was designed around our environment and our level of knowledge.

We were in a state of “we probably have to use AI, but we have no idea where to start.” The side-by-side approach fit that state remarkably well.

In my first year, my manager once ran a macro study session for us. He even bought us textbooks, and I tried building one myself for the work I had at the time. But I remember it taking a long time, and after that, writing a macro never crossed my mind again.

With AI, it was done in an instant. And it actually worked. That, quite simply, was moving.

Honestly, my reaction was something like, “if it’s this quick, lucky me.” There were no mixed feelings at all. Mostly I just felt grateful.

The biggest was our sense of the problems in our recruiting work at the time. We felt recruiting itself needed to change, and that bringing in technology like AI could make it better.

That was for my own sake, and for the team’s. So I pulled Sakaguchi in, and had other members join as well.

The other reason is that it was simply fun. Part of it is that I like new things, but every time we met, you gave us some kind of spark. That was fun.

And your enthusiasm was remarkable. Where most people would say “here is the program, this is what we will run,” you came back to face us again and again. We were glad, and grateful. If anything, it feels closer to say we were the ones allowed to keep going.

For me, I believe it has. Looking at the team as a whole, part of me feels we are not all the way there yet, but there are definitely people using it.

For example, document preparation now takes far less time. I feed in rough, unformatted notes and it shapes them into a proper document. Being able to work on something else in the meantime is huge. For researching outside information too, using Copilot, GPT, and Claude together, I feel the quality has gone up as well.

My role changed, so a simple comparison is not possible, but these days I work in the pattern of “have it build the deck while I do something else,” or “have it run the research while I push my own work forward.”

I now operate with a “me plus Copilot” mindset, as an addition to myself. By feel, the share of my work where I use AI has doubled or tripled. It has become a given, almost like infrastructure.

Just today, I realized I had not prepared the materials for my morning meeting. So I spent two or three minutes giving instructions to Copilot in Word and let it draft them, and used those ten minutes to move other work forward. The fact that my mind now jumps there immediately is one of the bigger changes.

We are still on the way. Without AI, I honestly think we would have been overwhelmed. With limited time and limited people, I feel AI is what keeps everything holding together. Still mid-journey, but I can now keep things turning within my own capacity.

No major surprise on my end. I don’t see those marks as a rating of one single session.

You were involved with us six or seven times before the training itself, and the members joined the session already knowing you to some degree. I think the marks reflect that entire body of engagement.

Some people saw potential in voice input. Others noticed the differences between the various AI tools. It reached places you cannot get to just by reading articles. There is surely room to improve, but I don’t feel the number is far off.

It feels about right to me. In a fixed two-hour session, it is hard to leave every person fully happy with every part. But you packed so many essential pieces into it. And on top of that, you pitched it to our level, the level of people who simply didn’t know. So everyone came away with at least one thing that hooked them, and for many people it stuck.

I myself fundamentally did not understand what AI was, or even where to begin trying to understand it.

But by talking through concrete things with you, I came to know what text and video alone could never show me. The picture sharpened enormously.

Unless you are already deeply interested, taking that first step through text and video alone is hard. So the value of learning from a person, of having someone actually show you, of making time to talk face to face: I think that really mattered.

A fun one. My thinking changed enough that ten years from now, I expect to look back on it as a turning point, for my work and my life outside it. I have real conviction that what you did for us was genuinely worth it.

That it stayed enjoyable mattered too. Looking back, it was full of stimulation, and I could feel it feeding my own growth. I think that is exactly why it was fun.

For me too, the feeling is fun. I went from a vague unease and worry about AI to seeing it as something that can change my work and my life, a shift toward something I can genuinely be excited about.

I believe this program was the trigger.