Company Introduction

Dairy Kingdom Co., Ltd. is a company located in Kannami Town, Shizuoka Prefecture, that operates the Dairy Kingdom Orache tourist ranch and also sells its own craft beer and other alcoholic beverages. For the past 30 years since its establishment, the company has continued to build its roots in the local community through tourism and manufacturing businesses that utilize local resources.

The company has around 50 employees, including part-timers, and despite its small size, it is able to handle a wide range of tasks, including the operation of tourist facilities, product manufacturing, sales, and planning, and has built a flexible system of collaboration within the company.

Issues before introducing generative AI

With a small number of people working on multiple tasks in parallel, issues such as inefficiency and uneven workloads became apparent. In particular, clerical work often took a long time, which began to affect planning and manufacturing.

In particular, administrative tasks such as responding to emails and creating estimates took a lot of time, resulting in chronic overtime work. Furthermore, the events held every weekend had limited ideas and the content tended to become fixed. In the manufacturing department, work tends to be personalized, manuals have not been developed, and there were concerns that training would take a long time.

Benefits of using generative AI

Since we started using generative AI, we have seen various changes in the work of each department. For example, when planning an event, we can tell the AI the theme and it will suggest ideas, which increases the number of starting points for consideration and allows us to put content into shape in a shorter time than before. AI also automatically generates event quizzes based on the history and culture of the region, which is also used to provide information to visitors.

In sales, AI can automatically create drafts of product information and emails, significantly reducing the time required for document creation. In the manufacturing department, AI is also generating draft manuals, helping to advance standardization, something that had not been undertaken until now.

In the early stages of implementation, some employees were unfamiliar with using AI, but its use spread through in-house training and the sharing of prompt templates. In some cases, managers noticed an improvement in the quality of their subordinates' work and became interested in using AI themselves. Currently, almost all employees incorporate AI into their work two to five days a week.

Future outlook

[Digirise: Developing an official LINE chatbot for internal Q&A]

Going forward, we plan to further promote the use of generative AI in the development of manuals. Currently, it accounts for less than 10% of the total, but efforts have already begun to scan old paper manuals, read them into AI, and re-edit them. In particular, in the manufacturing department, there is an urgent need to formalize information that has previously relied on years of experience and verbal handover, and document generation by AI is helping to achieve this.

We are also developing a LINE-based bot to facilitate smooth communication of information to part-time and temporary staff. By creating a system that can automatically provide information on work regulations and frequently asked questions, we hope to reduce the burden on the general affairs department and improve the work efficiency of all employees.