Supporting AI adoption across business processes, organizational operations, and product development to enhance productivity and execution across the company

TOKYO, JAPAN (July 2, 2026) – SmartNews, a global leader in news discovery, has established the AI Transformation Division, a new internal organization designed to transform company operations around AI.

As part of SmartNews’s Business & Operations organization, the AI Transformation Division will help build a company-wide foundation for AI adoption by integrating these areas and enabling teams  to use AI safely and effectively.

Background and Key Roles of the AI Transformation Division

1. Building a company-wide AI foundation that brings together business, product, and engineering

The AI Transformation Division will develop a common AI foundation that enables all employees and organizations across SmartNews to use AI safely and effectively. Working across business, product, and engineering, the division will advance the development of an AI Control Plane: an integrated foundation for AI adoption that covers areas such as improving AI-enabled development infrastructure, establishing shared platforms for business agents and other tools, authentication and permission management, and cost management.

The division will also create secure ways to connect internal information and business tools with AI, supporting both the speed and safety of AI adoption across the company.

2. Democratizing product development and operational improvement through AI

SmartNews is working to create an environment where AI is not limited to specialized roles or engineers, but can be used by all employees, including non-engineers, in product development and day-to-day operations.

Through the company-wide rollout of AI tools such as Claude Code and the development of supporting usage environments, the AI Transformation Division will help each employee use AI according to their own business challenges, enabling them to improve workflows and create prototypes.

“As generative AI continues to evolve, companies are being called upon not only to improve operational efficiency, but also to rethink the way work gets done and how organizations themselves should operate,” said Kaisei Hamamoto, CEO and Co-Founder of SmartNews. “For SmartNews, AI Transformation is a management priority that will allow us to deliver greater value to society, faster. Through the establishment of the AI Transformation Division, we will evolve into a company where every employee thinks, acts, and creates results with AI as a core premise. As we work toward our mission of delivering the world’s quality information to the people who need it, we will continue building a company suited to the AI era.”

SmartNews will continue to share updates on specific initiatives led by the AI Transformation Division and use cases from teams across the company, as it advances its transformation toward company operations built around AI.