English 
Amazon Web Services Japan, LLC and Ricoh Co., Ltd. will strengthen their collaboration to accelerate Ricoh’s creation of high-value-added digital services that help improve the efficiency and productivity of its customers’ operations.
AWS Japan will strengthen collaboration with Ricoh, which is transforming itself into a digital services company, in four areas. In the field of AI, Ricoh will use AWS’s cutting-edge AI technology and generative AI services to accelerate the provision of AI-related solutions, and will further strengthen the provision of value to customers by deploying various applications globally and establishing an environment for collecting and analyzing customer contact data through the Ricoh Group’s common platform “RICOH Smart Integration (RSI),” which AWS Japan will help build. In addition, Ricoh will migrate the common business platform for the entire group to AWS in order to strengthen the integrated management and governance of its internal IT. In addition, Ricoh plans to utilize AWS’s training for AI, data analysis, and developers to develop and strengthen high-level digital talent that can respond to increasingly complex business needs.
Supporting Ricoh’s AI development and service provision
Ricoh, which began developing AI in the 1980s, has been developing deep learning AI using image recognition technology since 2015, and has been providing “work AI” using natural language processing technology to analyze documents in offices and customer voices (VOC) received at call centers to improve business efficiency and customer support since 2021. As the labor force decline and aging become more serious, Ricoh believes that using AI to improve productivity and add value to work is the key to corporate growth, and has begun research and development of Ricoh’s own LLM using the AWS LLM Development Support Program implemented by AWS Japan and the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center , where AWS supports customers’ use of generative AI globally. With the support of AWS, Ricoh developed its own LLM through continuous pre-learning, and in March 2023, it announced a 6 billion parameter Japanese-compatible LLM, and in August 2024, it announced its own LLM with 70 billion parameters that has high Japanese performance and can also support English and Chinese. In order to reduce costs and achieve high performance in the development of this LLM, Ricoh is using the largest volume of Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances of AWS Trainium , an AI chip provided by AWS dedicated to AI training and inference, in the world, reducing costs by approximately 50% and improving energy efficiency by up to 25% compared to conventional AWS (compared to conventional methods and development). This allows Ricoh to develop custom LLMs for customers at a lower cost and in a shorter delivery time. In addition, in June 2025, Ricoh developed a multimodal large-scale language model with the support of AWS, which provides computing resources for the project, in the “GENIAC” project, which aims to strengthen the development of generative AI in Japan, implemented by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). In this way, Ricoh is developing various AI platforms that can be provided according to customer needs, and in addition to image recognition and natural language processing, it is also promoting research and development of voice recognition AI and has begun providing AI agents with voice dialogue functions. As various AI agents are increasingly used within companies, we can respond flexibly and quickly to diverse customer needs in the era of multi-AI agents, which is expected to become full-scale in the future, by utilizing AWS’s fully managed service Amazon Sagemaker and generative AI service Amazon Bedrock . Ricoh is also actively working on the development of digital clone technology, and is using Amazon EC2 GPU instances to provide services to customers who use it for everything from office reception and guidance to employee training and recruitment activities. Ricoh is working to combine AWS’s latest AI technology and highly flexible and scalable cloud services with Ricoh’s own AI development technology and its document and IT technology and service provision capabilities that it has been working on for many years, to support customers’ business innovation and efficient, high-value-added work styles, and contribute to improving corporate value. Ricoh is working to improve the efficiency of product development and reduce costs by supporting the construction of the Ricoh Group’s common platform “RICOH Smart Integration” Ricoh is building the group’s common platform “RSI” on AWS. RSI is a common cloud platform that promotes business creation globally, with basic functions necessary for the development and operation of digital services. It has various functions that realize efficient product development and cost reduction, and enable high scalability and innovation. In order to strengthen the RSI platform, Ricoh adopted AWS managed services and serverless services to design the architecture and reduce the operational burden. Specifically, it uses various AWS services, such as building an IoT platform using AWS IoT Core , AWS Fargate for the container platform , and Amazon S3 as a data lake for the data platform. Using RSI, Ricoh developed and released a new service called RICOH kintone plus in just two months. Ricoh will continue to promote data integration between services and data utilization to promote customer success activities, and with the support of AWS, will use RSI to globally deploy generative AI technology, improve the analytical environment for customer contact point data, and strengthen the service delivery system. Achieving significant cost reduction by cloudifying the internal core system/common data utilization platform.
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In addition to maintaining and operating traditional IT infrastructure and developing applications, Ricoh’s corporate IT department is using digital technology to deepen existing businesses and create new business models, and is promoting various projects in an agile and parallel manner. In a large-scale cloud migration project for core systems carried out by Ricoh from 2020 to 2022, more than 80% of the systems were migrated to AWS. In addition, the platform for providing customer applications in-house is also being migrated from an on-premises environment to the cloud and the security level is being improved at the same time, promoting the provision of safer and more comfortable services.
Ricoh Japan Co., Ltd., Ricoh’s domestic sales company, is promoting data-driven management and has adopted Amazon Redshift and Amazon QuickSight as its data utilization platform . It began full-scale use in 2022, and the number of users using data with Amazon QuickSight has already reached 12,000, which is two-thirds of the company’s total employees. This is the largest use case of Amazon QuickSight in Japan, and the company is working to contribute to sales activities through big data analysis that combines BI and AI in order to enhance data utilization.
Accelerating the development of high-level digital talent to meet increasingly complex business needsRicoh
has set four priority areas for the development of digital talent: business architects, software engineers, data scientists, and cybersecurity. In the 21st Mid-term Management Strategy, the company set an ESG goal of developing a total of 4,000 key talent by the end of fiscal year 2025, but as a result of promoting development measures throughout the company, the goal was achieved in fiscal year 2024.
In response to Ricoh’s digital talent development measures, AWS provides Architecting on AWS, a class training for solution architects, solution design engineers, and developers who need to understand AWS architecture design, and its advanced version, Advanced Architecting on AWS. In fiscal year 2022, approximately 200 people across the リコー Group took the course, and in fiscal year 2023, approximately 130 people took the course. In fiscal year 2024, approximately 80 people took 14 types of training, including more specialized training. In fiscal 2025, we will utilize AWS’s digital talent development support, including AI, data analysis, and developer training, to focus on developing high-level digital talent with more advanced knowledge and skills and who can play an active role as professionals.
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