Mercari hits 100% AI tool use, 7.6× engineer output

Mercari's push began in 2025, when it set out a vision to redesign how work is done around AI. Tools such as ChatGPT and Claude spread across the company in about half a year, but leadership questioned whether that adoption was translating into business results. Kimura's answer was to make AI agents the premise of work in each business area, rather than treating AI as an add-on to existing processes.

The rollout was not frictionless. With roughly 2,000 employees, some did not know what to do, and a small number of managers blocked staff who wanted to invest time in agent-building. Kimura used a company-wide gathering every two weeks to argue that time spent building agents was not wasted, yet complaints about lacking time persisted — suggesting that leader messaging alone does not remove workload constraints.

The earnings figures give Mercari a concrete benchmark: 100% tool usage and 7.6× engineer output versus the June 2024 period. The company now faces a follow-on question it has itself raised: how to reward employees whose productivity reaches 10 times, a signal that AI-driven output gains may force changes to compensation and evaluation.