Panasonic resurrects long-dead founder as an AI to share his management wisdom

Panasonic aims for the AI to assist in future management decisions

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WTF?! Bringing back dead actors so they can appear in modern media has long been a contentious area, but what about resurrecting a long-deceased CEO as an AI clone so he can pass on his wisdom to current employees? Panasonic thinks it's okay, having just created an AI version of founder Kōnosuke Matsushita, who died in 1989.

Panasonic states that the number of people who interacted directly with the man known as Japan's "God of management" is declining every year.

The company adds that it is important for its employees to understand Matsushita's management philosophy, on which its current Basic Management Policy is based, and pass it on "through the ages."

The University of Tokyo-affiliated Matsuo Institute codeveloped the AI. It's trained on Matsushita's writings, lectures, speeches, and interviews digitized by Panasonic's Peace and Happiness through Prosperity Institute, a thinktank Matsushita founded that aims to bring peace and fulfillment to human society by assuring both spiritual and material abundance, apparently.

Matsushita's statue

The AI, which was also trained using over 3,000 of Matsushita's voice recordings, imitates the way Panasonic's founder thinks, acts, and talks, allowing it to deliver Matsushita's ideas and thoughts directly to those he never met during his lifetime.

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Panasonic wants to take the program a step further by further developing the clone so it can help users make management decisions based on what the real Matsushita would have done.

The whole thing does sound pretty concerning, especially the plan for the AI to eventually help with business decisions. Could this be the first step toward a future where corporations are led by AI versions of long-dead CEOs, making the same decisions their human counterparts would have made?

"The development of generative AI technology provides a new approach to the verification of traditional research questions, and we hope that it will enable us to take on previously impossible interdisciplinary research using innovative methods," explained Panasonic.

Matsushita is hugely respected in Japan, revered as one of the country's greatest business leaders of all time. He wrote over 40 books, including The Path, which is still considered a must-read for those in the business world.

In related AI-zombie news, a company is going to trial with Disney over the CGI recreation of actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, in Rogue One.