Technology & Monozukuri

Governance: Basic Concepts of Technology Development

At DeNA, our production framework is built on a comprehensive strength where six interconnected elements support each other. In addition to the conventional elements of Product, Design, and Development, this framework incorporates three crucial components: Quality Management, Infrastructure, and Security. Since our founding, we have cultivated this production system with a strong service-oriented focus. Our particular strength has been the robust foundation built by specialized teams, especially in the areas of security and infrastructure.

We are currently redefining the very nature of DeNA's technology development by deeply integrating AI as an indispensable element across all these domains, dramatically strengthening and updating each of our activities.

Product
AI accelerates and deepens research and market understanding, dramatically improving the efficiency of information gathering, organization, and output. It also enables faster and more precise simulations of business strategies and verification plans, supporting swift decision-making. Prototyping with Vibe Coding allows for a rapid hypothesis-testing cycle.

Design
AI has expanded the role of designers to that of a Knowledge Architect. By leveraging AI-powered design tools, we are not only significantly reducing production costs but also enhancing the quality and quantity of our thinking. This is achieved by enabling a rapid, iterative process of thinking through creation.

Development
Every engineer is fully equipped with AI development support tools (such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Claude Code, v0, etc.), dramatically enhancing development efficiency. These engineers are now powerfully leading the transition to becoming an AI-native company by reconfiguring their workflows to be centered around AI.

Quality Management
Based on the belief that quality is everyone's responsibility to build in, we are integrating AI into the development cycle to continuously optimize Q (quality), C (cost), and D (delivery). In the upstream process, AI predicts risks and suggests effective testing perspectives, leading to higher quality and reduced rework costs. In the downstream process, we are working to accelerate the development cycle by using AI for automatic test case generation, which reduces man-hours.

Infrastructure
We stably operate a large-scale system that handles approximately 15 billion requests and petabytes of data daily. To maintain the reliability of this massive system, we have introduced Observability and AIOps for 24/7 monitoring and immediate incident response, striving to speed up anomaly detection and root cause analysis (RCA). By entrusting the trend analysis of vast logs and metrics to AI, we are achieving automated and advanced operations, which enables faster and more accurate decision-making.

Security
We actively leverage our proprietary AI to innovate security governance. Our AI assistant, which has learned our internal regulations and rules, creates an environment where employees can easily ask any questions, thereby embedding a strong security awareness throughout the organization. We are also automating the safety evaluation of new tools and systems using AI to enable swift security verification without disrupting business operations. Through this "proactive security" co-created with AI, we support our safe growth and new challenges.
Information Security

Governance: AI Strategy Promotion Structure

DeNA has established a robust promotion structure to implement its three pillars of AI strategy: All-Company Productivity Enhancement, Enhancement of Competitiveness in Existing Businesses, and AI New Business Creation & Growth. Leveraging our unique data foundation, which we have cultivated over many years, a cross-functional team of AI experts is leading the powerful promotion of our AI strategy. Furthermore, to expand and accelerate these initiatives across all business domains, every engineer, now fully equipped with AI tools, is driving efforts in their respective fields.

AI Expert Team Driving Company-Wide AI Integration
The AI Expert Team, which possesses expertise in AI and knowledge of our business domains, is driving the company-wide adoption of AI.

Led by the AI Promotion GEX, which provides overall oversight, the team consists of approximately 100 members, including engineers, legal professionals, quality management and security specialists, and experts from each business division. Additionally, a team of about 30 engineers is continuously evaluating the latest AI tools.

This team acts as a command center, leveraging its accumulated AI technology and operational know-how to flexibly plan and execute everything from prioritizing, and planning and deciding on approaches to technology selection, development, and operation. A key feature of this team is its strong focus not only on specialization but also on how AI can contribute to the business.

Unique Data Foundation
Leveraging the unique data foundation that DeNA has cultivated over many years is essential for AI to produce valuable output.
Since our founding, DeNA has utilized vast amounts of data across diverse businesses, products, services, and management. We have monitored data from multiple perspectives, including user numbers, active rates, and revenue, as well as service usage and user experience.
Approximately 80 data engineers, MLOps engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists consistently run the cycle of data collection and management, AI model application, and practical use in services, ensuring the secure and effective utilization of data.
By combining and maximizing the use of data unique to DeNA, particularly in the healthcare and sports fields, we aim to innovate existing businesses and create new AI-native businesses, thereby establishing differentiation and a competitive advantage over other companies.

Transforming Every Engineer into an AI Engineer
We position AI as a fundamental skill for all engineers and are promoting the enhancement of AI utilization skills.

In addition to the company-wide adoption of Gemini Advanced, we have fully equipped our engineers with AI development support tools such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Claude Code, and v0, as their minimum arsenal. We also provide the freedom to use additional weapons by creating a process that allows all employees to safely and instantly try out the latest tools.

Furthermore, we have introduced the DARS (DeNA AI Readiness Score) system, which visualizes each engineer's generative AI usage level and links it to their goal setting. We are designing educational content and fostering an environment where we teach each other to help everyone aim for the next level.

These initiatives are the driving force behind broadly leading the AI strategy across all of DeNA's business domains.

Strategy: AI Promotion Examples

Enhancing Productivity
We are advancing the use of AI in quality management tasks that are common across all of DeNA's services and products. The cost of quality management amounts to several billion yen annually for the entire company, making it a key area where significant productivity gains can be expected from AI integration.
We are currently focusing on test case creation and verification tasks as they require a particularly high number of man-hours. For example, traditionally, it took a vast amount of time to manually verify game master data and to extract and format information from massive specification documents to create test case sheets. These labor-intensive tasks are where we can expect significant efficiency improvements.
While the accuracy of AI has not yet reached a professional level for these tasks, we are currently in the process of conducting context engineering, regularly assessing the AI's contribution numerically, and steadily moving toward our goal through trial and error.

Strengthening Existing Businesses
At the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, we are leveraging AI to strengthen the team.

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  - Catchers: We are quantitatively evaluating and visualizing their blocking abilities and other skills to clarify development goals for each player. We are implementing initiatives to promote the growth of our younger catchers.
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  - Pitchers: We measure their command ability (the ability to throw to a targeted location) from video footage, visualizing the gap to the level required to succeed in the top league. This contributes to making promotion decisions for promising pitchers and assists players with their daily adjustments.
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  - Batters: We are using high-speed cameras to perform 3D motion analysis of swings, significantly increasing the feedback from biomechanics specialists. By quickly helping them improve individual batting challenges, we are strengthening the batting lineup.

Creating New Businesses
At our AI Innovation Business Unit, we have innovated the new business creation process by making it mandatory to submit a prototype developed with generative AI when proposing a new project. Submissions consisting only of a business plan are not accepted.
The goal behind this is to prevent the gap that traditionally exists between the business plan and the final product, and to enable swift and accurate decision-making by seeing the actual prototype. Engineers, designers, and business professionals alike are using AI development tools like Devin to bring their ideas to life through Vibe Coding. Since the start of this initiative, around 15 new business proposals have already been submitted using this method, with particularly enthusiastic young employees actively bringing in their prototypes.
By immediately turning ideas into tangible products, we are dramatically accelerating both the speed and quality of new business creation.

Risk Management: AI Utilization and Risk Management

DeNA established the DeNA Group AI Policy (the Policy) on February 24, 2023, and it was released on March 27, 2023.

While the use of AI can greatly contribute to the promotion of the DeNA Group’s business operations, misuse could lead to disadvantages for stakeholders. This policy was designed as a guideline to promote the appropriate use of AI throughout the Group in a safe, secure, and reliable manner, while complying with laws and regulations. By creating a policy based on DeNA’s existing strong IT governance, we have achieved both a sense of speed and a balance with safety and security.

Ensuring Robust Information Security and Privacy Protection
At DeNA, our basic approach for information security is to protect customer information appropriately and ensure the security of the services we provide and our internal systems. Based on this approach, the company strives to provide safe and secure services by establishing and complying with the Group Information Security Policy (GISP) and the Group Information Security Standard for Information Management (GISS), in addition to the DeNA Group Information Security Policy. The security policy is constantly updated to address increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.
The company has established a Personal Information Management Committee and an Information Security Management Committee to build a cross-group management system. Matters discussed by these committees are regularly reported to management meetings and the Board of Directors and are reflected in important business decisions.

Expert Internal Security Team
DeNA CERT is a cross-departmental security team centered around the Security Department, providing business support on a day-to-day basis and responding to emergencies. Particularly in vulnerability diagnostics and hacking countermeasures for smartphone applications, our in-house security technology team develops unique diagnostic technologies and defense functions, conducting approximately 170 web and smartphone app diagnostics and about 4,200 platform diagnostics annually to improve our security level.
To prevent information leaks due to misconfigurations of cloud services, we have also self-developed a system that automatically monitors the configuration values of AWS and Google Cloud daily and sends a notification if an error is found.

AI Utilization Governance and Safety Assurance
With the proactive adoption of AI, DeNA has established the "DeNA Group AI Policy," and based on its guidelines, we have formulated the "DeNA Group AI Guidelines" to promote our employees' AI literacy and the appropriate use of AI. We are also preparing various manuals and conducting AI literacy training for generative AI to create an environment where all employees can utilize AI safely and securely.
We are also applying the IT system governance structure we have built to our AI tools, ensuring safe access management in addition to budget/performance and asset management, that also allows us to promptly address the unique vulnerabilities and risks associated with AI’s frequent update cycles.

Separating Trials from Usage to Achieve Both Proper Evaluation and Speed
In the introduction of AI tools, we have clearly distinguished between trial usage, which allows the immediate implementation and verification of tools under certain rules regarding information classification and management systems, and full-scale use, which is implemented after a thorough risk assessment. In this approach, new tools can first be trialed based on a set of simplified checks. Concurrently with the trial, a comprehensive review from legal and security perspectives is conducted to enable a smooth transition to full usage.

Indicators and Goals

DeNA has established KPIs for the materiality in corporate capital. For intellectual capital, we are committed to strengthening technology, responding to and leading new technologies, and actively using new technologies, including AI technology, both inside and outside the company. We also aim to contribute to the advancement of technology in society by disseminating our knowledge. For social capital, we are committed to maximizing partnership synergies, which are one of DeNA's strengths. Collaboration with our partners is essential to create even greater Delight. We strive to combine our respective strengths to create greater value, and to establish and maintain fair, sincere, and mutually beneficial relationships in accordance with sound business practices.

DARS (DeNA AI Readiness Score)
This is an indicator to support the upskilling of each individual in their use of AI, as DeNA aims to become an AI-native company.
We will visualize each individual's usage level and the level of the organization as a whole during each semi-annual evaluation cycle.

Contribution to Society through Technology

At DeNA, we aim to contribute to the advancement of technology in society by actively sharing the technical knowledge gained through our business activities, rather than keeping it within the company.
DeNA TechCon is a technical conference that we have hosted since 2016 with the target of contributing to the advancement of technology in society by sharing the knowledge gained by DeNA’s engineers through their work.
In February 2025, we held a joint, online event featuring DeNA TechCon and DeNA × AI Day which focused on Business Development in the AI Era. The overall theme was UTILIZATION, signifying the use and application of technology. As a first time initiative, at DeNA × AI Day, we shared the knowledge DeNA has gained from its AI technology investment and practice since 2016, and communicated our vision for AI-driven business development through various AI utilization case studies, ranging from entertainment to the resolution of social initiatives.
On the DeNA Engineering blog our engineers publish articles about the issues they have faced and the technological challenges to overcome them. We also proactively participate and speak at technology conferences.
Another of our initiatives to contribute to better technology around the world is the DeNA Tech Studio program. We support both DeNA employees and external engineers by inviting them to casual study sessions on engineering.
In the AI area, the situation both in Japan and overseas is fluid, and only becoming more so. Amidst this situation, DeNA employees participate in the AI use strategy task force of the Japan Business Federation, and we are striving to make industry-leading contributions by gathering information and providing advice on policy and legal frameworks.
Also, one of DeNA’s core competencies is our unique, diverse businesses and the use of AI in them. We maximize synergy with our design and solution development capabilities, another core competence, and aim to become an AIUX* leading company, which is not yet established in Japan. To this end, we are proactively sharing technology and insight about AI both internally and externally in the form of academic conferences, tech events, and blogs, among others.
*This refers to maximizing the user experience and value in the development of AI solutions