DeNa, the mobile developer behind the hit game Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, recently announced a major change in its rules for proposing projects within the company. Apparently, every written project proposal in certain departments of DeNA now needs to be accompanied by an AI generated prototype (as reported by ITMedia). DeNa thinks this approach will “make the project approval process more efficient.”
This change came with the launch of DeNA’s AI business innovation headquarters in April. For now, the new rules are in operation only in departments belonging to this headquarters. However, they won’t be affecting just AI engineers – everyone, including employees specializing in business and creative professionals such as designers, will have to abide by them.
“It is much quicker to implement the project straight away compared to a writing a proposal, and it’s much easier to make a proper decision regarding the project if you can actually see the prototype. Furthermore, the projects will improve in quality if their creators get a better grasp on how generative AI is operated,” an official at DeNA explained.
The head of the AI business innovation department, Seiichiro Sumiyoshi, commented that most industry projects that get approved are created by people who are passionate enough to make the prototype for their product as well – implying that this change could motivate workers to create their own prototypes and get more of their projects on the market. According to Sumiyoshi, the department is already working on a mobile application development project, and has around 15 different projects already prototyped.
On a related note, on July 2, DeNA announced that their subsidiary DeNA AI Link formed a partnership with Cognition AI Inc. to support development of the AI software engineer tool Devin in Japan. Apparently, DeNA has been using Devin since February this year in order to reduce the workload of their software engineers and boost their individual productivity.
