What does it take for a 125-year-old technology company to reinvent itself for the AI era? NEC is already taking that step, moving from continuous transformation to AI at scale.
Founded in 1899, NEC Corporation is one of Japan’s leading technology companies, operating globally across IT services, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure. Over the decades, the company has continuously adapted to new waves of technological change, but today’s shift is different. Artificial intelligence is not just another innovation cycle; it is redefining how organizations operate at their core.
For NEC, this means rethinking not only technology, but also how work gets done, how decisions are made, and how value is created.
In a recent conversation with Thomas Pfiester, head of Customer Engagement & Adoption and member of the Extended Board of SAP SE, NEC CIO Toshihiko Nakata shared how the company is approaching this challenge and why becoming an AI-native enterprise requires more than technology.
NEC’s journey toward becoming an AI-native enterprise did not begin with AI; it began with a fundamental shift in how the company operates. By rethinking systems, processes, data, and organization as one, NEC laid the groundwork for continuous transformation.
Over time, this meant building a strong digital foundation, standardizing processes, embracing a clean core strategy, increasing transparency, and enabling more connected, data-driven decision-making across the business.
With this in place, NEC moved early to modernize its core systems with RISE with SAP. The ambition went beyond cloud migration. It was about creating a more flexible and resilient environment that can evolve with changing business needs while addressing the complexity that had built up over time.
“By moving to RISE with SAP, we’ve laid the foundation to modernize our corporate infrastructure and speed up our use of AI agents like Joule,” Nakata-san says.
Simplifying that landscape became a strategic priority. Through its clean core approach, NEC is reducing complexity and creating conditions for faster innovation, turning its core into a platform for continuous improvement rather than maintenance.
Building on this foundation, NEC is now accelerating its next phase: scaling AI across the enterprise. Rather than treating AI as isolated use cases, the company is embedding it into everyday work, supporting employees, streamlining processes, and enabling new ways of operating. In collaboration with SAP, NEC is bringing AI closer to where decisions are made, integrating capabilities such as SAP Business AI and Joule directly into its business processes.
Looking ahead, NEC sees AI as a defining force for the next phase of enterprise transformation. At the same time, Nakata-san emphasizes that realizing that potential requires more than technology. It requires the ability to continuously adapt, and that’s the cornerstone of NEC success.
Panagiotis Moutas is part of Executive Communications, Customer Engagement & Adoption, at SAP.
