Sumitomo Chemical Launches In-house Generative AI Service "ChatSCC"
Aiming for a Dramatic Improvement in Productivity and More Effective Use of Proprietary Data

Oct. 24, 2023

Sumitomo Chemical has developed an in-house generative AI service “ChatSCC,” which utilizes ChatGPT*, and has made it available for all of its approximately 6,500 employees. Through this, the Company aims to achieve a dramatic improvement in productivity in the short term, as well as to enhance the competitiveness of its existing businesses and create new business models through more effective use of its proprietary data in the future.

The key feature of ChatSCC is its secure environment that ensures input information will not leak outside of Sumitomo Chemical, enabling the Company to handle its proprietary information on the platform. This service can be used not only for general office tasks, such as documentation, proofreading, and program source code generation, but also for analysis of research and manufacturing data and generation of ideas for technology.

During the preliminary verification process, Sumitomo Chemical tested ChatSCC on approximately 200 typical patterns of its business operations, and found that it contributed to improving operational efficiency by a maximum of over 50%. After the full-scale rollout of ChatSCC, in order to maximize the benefits of the service, the Company has been stepping up efforts to expand the use of ChatSCC by sharing with its employees a collection of frequently used instruction and question prompts, techniques for creating instruction documents that are effective in various business operations scenarios, rules for prohibited actions and precautions to be observed, and training videos for beginners.

Going forward, by linking its proprietary data to ChatSCC, Sumitomo Chemical will establish a scheme to enable more effective use of the knowledge accumulated within its individual organizations. In addition, the Company will explore the possibility of implementing specialized AI models developed through additional training on data from specific fields to accelerate its efforts to further improve operational efficiency and create greater added value.

Sumitomo Chemical has positioned improving productivity and strengthening its businesses through digital innovation as one of its strategies under its Corporate Business Plan. The Company will continue to strive to improve its productivity, enhance the competitiveness of its existing businesses, and also create new business models by leveraging the ever-evolving AI technologies.

Comment from Takeo Kitayama, Executive Officer, Sumitomo Chemical

Through the company-wide deployment of ChatSCC, we will increase the time employees can spend on creative tasks. This will increase Sumitomo Chemical’s solution development capabilities and strengthen our businesses globally.
From the creation of new materials and the development of their applications, to the design of production processes, our operations are driven by a wide range of data and knowledge, so we believe that there will be no limit to what we can do through using ChatSCC. We will also consider implementing specialized AI models to boost the use of the wide-ranging in-house information that we have cultivated over many years.

*ChatGPT is a generative AI model and a chat system that was built based on GPT or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a large language model released by OpenAI in November 2022. It has acquired language comprehension and generation capabilities from being trained on a large amount of text data, and is capable of mimicking human-like conversations.

Contact

Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd.
Corporate Communications Dept.
https://www.sumitomo-chem.co.jp/english/contact/public/