Credit Saison ran a ChatGPT Enterprise pilot from late June to early August 2025 with 315 participants and reported a 954% return on investment (ROI) and an average time savings of 14 hours per employee per month. Based on those results the company rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise to all employees in September 2025, one month after the pilot ended.
Who participated and timeline
- Pilot period: late June–early August 2025.
- Participants: 315 people (volunteers, project-nominated staff, every executive including the president, and representatives from every department), representing just under 10% of Credit Saison’s roughly 3,700 employees in Japan.
- Companywide decision: ChatGPT Enterprise made available to all employees in September 2025.
Key outcomes and metrics
- ROI: 954% from the pilot (the company’s initial target was 500%).
- Time savings: average of 14 hours saved per participant per month, roughly 169 hours per year (initial target was 7.5 hours/month per person).
- Survey results: after the pilot, 75% of managers and 70% of nonmanagerial employees said they could not do without ChatGPT Enterprise.
- Departmental impact: about 80% of respondents in the legal department reported improved ability to do their job; over 80% in IT reported higher job satisfaction.
- Engineering productivity: Codex usage reportedly saved an average of 850 hours per month for the engineering team.
Leadership, support and change management
Kazutoshi Ono, Senior Managing Executive Officer, CDO and CTO, set a practical direction: “We won’t know until we really put it to work.” Leadership participation was explicit: every executive, including Katsumi Mizuno, representative director, executive president and COO, used the tools themselves. Mizuno created a custom GPT for company research and integrated it into his daily work.
The company’s Center of Excellence (CoE) facilitated adoption through an open Slack channel where teams shared successes and failures. OpenAI supported the pilot with executive training and hands-on workshops to help participants apply AI to real tasks.
Practical use cases adopted across the company
The pilot produced several custom GPTs that were put into regular use across functions.
Retail sales: capturing daily team debriefs
At counters in malls and other locations, a custom GPT transcribes and summarizes daily debrief audio into individual performance notes, meeting minutes, handover items and focus areas. Teams keep their usual meeting flow but spend far less time on documentation. The workflow’s familiarity helped adoption, and it’s now used at every location.
Corporate sales: turning research into better proposals
A custom GPT for company research helps sales teams analyze customers, identify business challenges and surface opportunities where Credit Saison services can help. In one analysis the tool revealed issues the team had not fully recognized, improving proposal quality.
Inside sales: practice opportunities for new hires
A prospect roleplay GPT simulates potential customers by voice, allowing less experienced staff to rehearse sales conversations and receive feedback without pulling senior colleagues away from selling.
Strategic framing: Employee AX, Customer AX, Corporate AX
Credit Saison frames AI transformation (AX) along three dimensions:
- Employee AX: changing how employees work and enabling tasks they could not do without AI (beyond sales, including engineering gains via Codex).
- Customer AX: improving customer experience, interfaces and UX — including an in-house AI call center under development.
- Corporate AX: rethinking organizational structures and roles around AI; this is at an earlier stage with specific applications being identified.
The company is also exploring ChatGPT Work to help employees focus on higher-value work while treating customer data protection as a precondition for any broader autonomous task handling.
Partnership and next steps
Credit Saison regards its relationship with OpenAI as important for staying up to date on capabilities, assessing new technologies for operational and customer value, and accelerating safe deployments once usefulness and security are ensured. The firm aims to scale small, practical productivity gains into improved customer interactions and organizational changes, pursuing an "Assistive Intelligence" approach to help people do more.
Conclusion
The pilot demonstrated measurable, short-term benefits — 954% ROI and substantial time savings — and rapid adoption driven by leadership usage, targeted custom GPTs for daily tasks, and active support from both the internal CoE and OpenAI. Credit Saison plans to extend these gains into customer-facing services and broader organizational redesign.
