NEC's AI lesson: fix the "excuse culture" first, then data

NEC's account ties a severe business slump — falling sales and profit, a withdrawn midterm plan, and engagement at 19% — to an internal habit of hiding inconvenient facts behind conveniently sliced data. Noguchi frames the response as organizational rather than technical: getting everyone to argue from the same facts. That required unifying data scattered across the company, which NEC pursued first by sharing management data and then by visualizing the large volume of transaction data from daily sales activity. Only after that groundwork does the Adachi Ward example appear, where the ward started from the goal of a crime-prevention dashboard, worked backward to the data it needed, and enabled staff to use AI dialogue to draft locally grounded measures. Read together, the two cases suggest the sequencing — purpose, then data readiness, then AI — is the point NEC is making, though the piece offers no measured results from the ward's dashboard.