Hitachi, Microsoft Enter Agreement To Accelerate Innovation With Gen AI
Hitachi Ltd. is collaborating with Microsoft Corp. over the next three years to accelerate innovation with generative artificial intelligence. The partnership will focus on creating solutions for energy, mobility and other sectors to deliver better outcomes for businesses and society.
Hitachi will embed the Microsoft cloud, Azure Open AI Service, Dynamics 365, Copilot for Microsoft 365 and GitHub Copilot into its Lumada solutions to accelerate business and improve productivity for its employees. The companies will promote joint projects to address business needs such as bolstering cloud services, enhancing security, and mitigating the environmental footprint of data centres, which have become an increasing area of focus with the growing use of generative AI.
“Under this new agreement, we are excited to further accelerate social innovation by expanding our efforts to social infrastructure areas such as energy and mobility, and by applying generative AI, to improve the productivity of frontline workers,” said Keiji Kojima, president and chief executive of Hitachi.
Hitachi’s generative AI centre and Microsoft will collaborate to improve operational efficiency and application development of the Hitachi Group by using Copilot for Microsoft 365 and GitHub Copilot. Hitachi will also use Azure OpenAI Service in a bid to improve its customer service. The company will combine Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot with its systems development expertise to improve quality and productivity for critical system development.
Hitachi Rail is leveraging generative AI for predictive maintenance, enhancing equipment monitoring and refining forecast accuracy. For example, a cloud-based platform on Microsoft Azure was used to streamline data visualisation and analysis, with AI providing data-driven insights to digitally monitor rail infrastructure.
Hitachi has also started to use Microsoft’s Generative AI for JP1 Cloud Services, a SaaS version of JP1, its integrated operations management software. According to the company, this will accelerate response times to address failures, and enable improved operational efficiencies for IT departments, financial and public institutions.
Hitachi Energy’s Enterprise Software Solutions technology and its partnership with Microsoft will also support the energy transition and work to improve access to and strengthening of digital solutions for asset performance management, energy trading and risk management.
As the impact of CO2 emissions from AI on the global environment increases, Hitachi and Microsoft will work toward zero carbon, starting with a data centre project in Europe, to reduce environmental impact.
Hitachi also said it will train more than 50,000 generative AI professionals on advanced software development skills using GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service.
“We are entering a new era of AI with the promise to deliver transformative business outcomes across every role and industry,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive at Microsoft. “Our expanded partnership with Hitachi will bring together the power of the Microsoft Cloud—including Microsoft Copilot—with Hitachi’s industry expertise to improve the productivity of 270,000 Hitachi employees and help address customers’ biggest challenges, including sustainability.”
