Toyota Connected's BR AX Digital Trust Promotion Department aims to make "AI-centric work practices" the norm across various internal business domains, including development, sales, and back office operations. We view the reasons for slow AX adoption not as "lack of skills on the ground," but rather as "friction costs" created by internal rules, business processes, governance/approval workflows that aren't AI-ready, and the UX of internal tools employees interact with. We believe it's crucial to update these "internal assumptions and UX" to be AI-ready. Support models relying on manual explanations, judgments, and reviews have already reached their limits in terms of the speed and scale of AI adoption. We aim to co-create these "internal assumptions and UX" across internal products and business systems with startups, fostering an environment where employees can safely and seamlessly leverage AI.


Challenges we want to solve through co-creation：
PoC progresses while AX remains stagnant: Structural challenges causing AX stagnation

While proof-of-concepts and trials of generative AI and AI agents are increasing across various products and operations within the company, the current state of AI adoption is not accelerating sufficiently due to the following reasons:
・Uncertainty about the scope and appropriate use cases for AI
・Lack of clarity regarding official tools, rules, and accountability
・Heavy approval workflows, contracts, and security checks even for small trials
These "friction costs" trap both AI-native employees and those hesitant about AI in a state of "wanting to use it but unable to start."
Particularly, treating AI-native employees and AI-hesitant employees with the same tools, same approval workflows, and same UX further amplifies these friction costs. To reduce this friction, we aim to co-create a state where AX can be accelerated organization-wide. This involves redesigning the entire "corporate OS"—including internal business processes, rules, governance, and UX—with AI as a fundamental assumption.

The Technology We Seek in Startups
・Technology capable of replacing manual review, screening, and decision-making processes that have traditionally relied on human labor, assuming an exponential increase in the volume and speed of app development and business automation
・Enterprise AI platform / AI agent foundation
・AI system evaluation, automated testing, monitoring, and log analysis
・AI usage workflow/UX design tools incorporating internal rules and governance
・Guided UI and templates to facilitate employee and field member engagement
・Internal copilot
・Technology for integration and collaboration with internal systems
(groupware, ticket management, knowledge bases, etc.)

Examples of Co-Creation Ideas

• Cross-departmental redesign of the UX for our "AI-first corporate OS/platform" (Transforming the confusion around official tools, cumbersome application processes, uncertainty in data-driven decisions, and lack of transparency regarding responsibility, logs, and evaluations into an "experience that empowers action")
• Co-creation of AI agents/copilots for employees (Providing APIs, execution environments, and autonomy to AI-natives; offering guidance, consultation, and delegation to hesitant employees, separating usage experience from responsibility boundaries)
• Co-creation of "frontline-friendly visualization" for evaluation, monitoring, and logs (Presenting what is acceptable/unacceptable, what is recorded, and how it is evaluated in a way employees can understand)
・Redesign "applications, approvals, and rules" with AI agents as the foundation (Agents handle judgment, confirmation, and explanation, enabling small-scale testing and maintaining daily workflow continuity)
※ Co-creation based on a design that separates the user experience itself, rather than simply differentiating outputs using the same tools or application flows

Available resources

・Knowledge of internal business processes, system configurations, and usage patterns
・Internal network for driving AX across multiple products and departments
・Internal AI platform and PoC environment (within publicly shareable scope)
・Access to development and user organizations within Toyota Connected
・Collaboration expertise with group companies and external partners