Is it enough to have only technical skills when we want to be the №1 global business AI company? Interview with Hiroto Takahira Director Head of Solution Development
1.What is your name and position?
Hiroto Takahira, Director Head of Solution Development group at Cinnamon.
Solution Development Group consists of Solution Development department, Software Engineering department and Data Operation development with more than 60 members.
2.Please tell us briefly about your career when you joined the company until you became an executive officer.
I worked more than 10 years in a large system engineering company in Japan. IT industry is a growing industry and I want to join the project and make a big impact for society.
I started my career as a software developer for enterprise system. After a few years I had been in charge of a project manager for huge system development projects for improving business operation in a telecom company for many years. I experienced as a PM to manage a big project with 100 members including foreign engineers from several companies. The project was so tough, but I learned a lot from it such as how to organize a large team and communicate with foreign people etc. After I successfully closed that project, I tried to find the new opportunity to develop a new business. Fortunately my company decided to form the new business development team and I applied for that. Then I was moved to the new business development team and worked on the development of a cloud robotics platform as a product owner. Cloud robotics is a concept to control different types of robots and IoT device from cloud. I learned how to collect data from various sensors, speech recognition, computer vision etc through the project. At that time I felt AI had a huge potential and decided to look for the opportunities working in AI industry.
I joined Cinnamon to develop a great product to make a big impact for society two and a half years ago. I was the 1st delivery manager in Cinnamon. In the first 6 month, I got swamped with handling multiple projects and recruiting members. The situation was so touch than I expected. Most things were not well documented and communication among teams was not so good. Moreover we were struggling to apply AI in the real business but were expected to expand our business at the same time. And fortunately I could meet the talented members, having great passions to move things forward from scratch to achieve our mission. And in the next 1 year, I worked on developing delivery department from scratch. Our team have established a lot of standardized processes and have improved transparency and efficiency of the projects. It’s still on the way, but I believe we’re heading to the right direction. From this year, my focus is not only on my department but also on the company level. We have a lot of great talents for sure in Cinnamon.
I expect that beside having the knowledge in AI/Development/Sales, I could maximize unite teams in Cinnamon to maximize company potential. And now I’m working on this as an executive officer.
3. How has AI industry and Cinnamon changed since you joined Cinnamon.
Competition of AI industry is getting more intense. We have a lot of competitors in AI-OCR, NLP and ASR that are our core technologies. Cinnamon has a lot of great AI talents and assets. But the key success factor is not only AI capabilities, but also how much we can innovate our client business. In the circumstances of Covid-19, this trend becomes more pronounced. Lately I feel members are more interested in understanding the market and researching how to solve client paint points than before. When I joined Cinnamon at the very first time, most of members focused on building AI models and research technical topics. Now I get a lot of questions regarding to the client business from members to understand client more. I think that all of members here start caring about business impact beside technical challenges.
4.What is worthwhile about your job?
I had been working for a large company before. At that time I just worked as the one of employees to be responsible for a part of the business process. It was difficult for me to feel the accomplishment. But now, my actions directly affect the performance of my team, my company and hopefully AI industry. This is really worthwhile. Besides that, I’m really excited to see the growth of members in our business.
5.What is the unique point of Cinnamon?
Firstly, we have a lot of young talented members. They don’t have so much experience in business, but they are really pursuing the things that they’re interested in and they’re rapidly growing. They have big potentials. That’s why I decided to dedicate myself to work at Cinnamon. Secondly, our organization structure is unique. Most of our project teams are formed across locations. In other companies, teams are separated based on the country and they take different responsibilities in each country. But in Cinnamon, we’re working as an unified team to achieve our mission on an equal footing. Lastly, a lot of things are conducted by bottom-up actions. Every member can show his or her opinion and can make a proposal to work on a new thing. In other words, every employee is responsible for what they’re doing and is expected to act autonomously.
AI industry has a great potential and is rapidly growing. The situation is changing from moment to moment. It’s like a sailing in uncharted waters, aiming to the new frontier. It might be hard, but will be exciting for sure. I’m really looking forward to working with people who enjoy hardness to carve out the new future. Thanks.
