Annual Report 2025 COOʼs Message

Sansan has evolved beyond a business card management service and into a database that supports company-wide productivity improvements and digital transformation for sales. Sansan's greatest strength lies in over 18 years of dedicated work in accurately digitizing analog information such as business cards and meeting notes, organizing diverse data by company, person, and activity, and structuring it.
　As the use of generative AI expands, unique data is essential for companies to gain a competitive advantage. Generic generative AI provides similar responses regardless of the user. However, combining it with information accumulated in Sansan creates distinct, practical value for each company. This means we're realizing a world in which corporate AI initiatives directly translate into the use of Sansan.
　As a first step, we will launch a Sansan MCP server. This server integrates information accumulated in Sansan with generative AI, enabling the use of Sansan through natural language. We aim to contribute to the qualitative transformation of decision-making and actions within sales teams and senior management. Through these efforts, we will accelerate new customer acquisition and upselling to existing customers, while further reducing churn rates.
　Now, as many companies begin to confront the question of how to leverage generative AI, we're positioning Sansan as the foundational business database for that purpose, and we continue to refine it into a solid, reliable option.

While Bill One has achieved high growth to date, its growth pace slowed in FY2024 as rush demand driven by legal reforms subsided. Nevertheless, we're beginning to see tangible progress in strengthening our growth trajectory, centered on the fundamental value proposition of "Accounting DX that reshapes how your company works." Improving sales productivity is the current top priority. While we've been actively hiring new talent to keep up with our rapid growth, it takes a certain period of training for new hires to become fully effective. To address this, we are visualizing the order-taking process and identifying and improving bottlenecks. This improves consistency and accelerates the ramping-up of new talent. At the same time, we continue to advance on the product front. Beyond the initial invoice receipt functionality, we've added expense reimbursement and accounts receivable management to our lineup, expanding use cases. Since June 2025, we've been integrating the sales structures for invoice receipt and expense reimbursement, and promoting bundled sales. As we move forward, we will strengthen our proposals for the Bill One Suite, which also includes accounts receivable management, to further improve unit price per customer and sales productivity. In fact, we've already received positive feedback beyond expectations, with customers telling us that it's simpler and more convenient to use multiple functions within a single solution.
　We also see significant room for expansion in our overseas markets. In addition to acquiring new customers, we're exploring a model that incorporates local needs and reverse-imports the solutions back to Japan. One such example is the introduction of a new feature, driven by overseas demand, that automatically reconciles invoice line-item information with purchase order data using generative AI. This feature leverages the natural language processing technology of the group company, Institute of Language Understanding Inc., to achieve advanced digitization. We will continue to strengthen our overseas expansion, with a particular focus on Thailand.

Contract One was launched in 2022. The idea for this solution stemmed when we noticed, while advancing the Bill One business, that many field operations were struggling with managing paper contracts, just as they had been with invoices. Within our own company as well, despite progress in invoice digitization, many contracts remained on paper, causing inconvenience for employees. Although electronic contract services were beginning to gain traction, they mainly focused on streamlining the pre-signing process, leaving executed contracts scattered across paper or digital files. Contract One was created to address this challenge.

　While other legal tech solutions mainly focus on supporting the pre-signing process, Contract One is unique in that it accurately digitizes executed contracts and makes them usable in a database. This is where our strength in high-precision digitization of analog information translates into a competitive advantage. We're now implementing generative AI across our solutions and we believe that Contract One holds the greatest growth potential.
Contract-related data is highly unique to each company, and its accumulation represents a true treasure trove of knowledge.

　For example, the ability to instantly summarize the contract history and transaction volumes with a specific client directly supports the planning of field sales strategies and enables faster management decisions. In practice, there are often cases where client interactions proceed without a full understanding of the client. By digitizing contracts and making them easily visualizable, we can deliver unprecedented value. While expanding features using generative AI, we will actively highlight this value proposition to create new markets.

　However, a current challenge is low brand awareness. Compared with Sansan, awareness of Contract One remains relatively limited, with SMEs comprising the core of its current customer base. We are strengthening our sales resources and focusing on talent development to accelerate expansion into the enterprise segment. We also began airing television commercials at the end of FY2024. These efforts aim to raise awareness and drive further growth.

As someone overseeing multiple businesses, the metric I prioritize most when considering optimal resource allocation is sales productivity—specifically, the value of orders per salesperson. I review this figure every month and use it to inform resource allocation decisions.

　Business growth ultimately comes down to how effectively we can improve sales productivity. To achieve this, it's crucial to increase the volume of sales meetings while improving the conversion rate into orders. In 2025, under our company-wide "AI-First" initiative, generative AI adoption is expanding across sales operations. We are starting to see steady results. Operational efficiency is improving by double-digit percentages, though it varies by department, through a variety of initiatives, including analyzing prospect information, providing brainstorming support in place of managers, automating analysis of recorded sales meetings, and streamlining talent development.

　For our company to grow further, each of our solutions needs to steadily advance its growth in line with its respective market environment. Building on this, we aim to create even greater value through collaboration among solutions. In particular, Sansan and Contract One complement each other extremely well in leveraging generative AI.

　Integrating encounter data with resulting contract information can provide unprecedented added value. For example, querying generative AI about the relationship between one's company and another company can extract the business card exchange history from Sansan and past contract details from Contract One, providing a more detailed understanding.

　With Bill One, we're generating synergies across its invoice receipt, expense reimbursement, and accounts receivable functions, while leveraging generative AI to further accelerate accounting automation.

　Sansan and Eight will also collaborate to co-create markets. While Sansan continues to expand mainly in the enterprise segment, growth in the SME segment will be pursued through collaboration with Eight Team. Additionally, we're creating an environment for Eight users to transition to Sansan seamlessly. At present, the market is not narrow enough to cause cannibalization between the two solutions, so we consider it optimal to prioritize the independent growth of each.

As one of the founding members, I see the evolution and widespread adoption of generative AI as an immense opportunity for realizing our long-term vision: "Become business infrastructure." I'm convinced that our business can become the infrastructure that supports the very core of business.

　Each of our solutions offers unique value, and for over a year, we've been exploring how to bring them together most effectively as part of our company-wide discussions on our corporate purpose. Through this process, we've come to recognize that combining our accumulated data and technological assets with generative AI lets us take a major step toward realizing our vision. The greatest opportunity to do so is now. We will align the entire company's awareness and seize this moment of change to further strengthen the value of Sansan, Bill One, and Contract One as a foundation for supporting corporate AI initiatives.

　I personally have a strong desire to open a breakthrough path for expanding our business globally over the medium-to-long term. Our operations are now centered on Sansan and Bill One, but strategic use of AI will further clarify the path for global business expansion. Sansan has evolved beyond business card and contact management, and into a business database encompassing corporate and activity information. Even globally, corporate contact information remains valuable. Combining it with generative AI can create new value and, in this regard, domestic and overseas markets are not different. Our current priority is growth within Japan, but when opportunities arise to capture growth in the global market, we won't hesitate to step on the accelerator and continue challenging ourselves to become global business infrastructure.

　Our business scale is still modest, but this makes growth all the more essential. We are committed to seizing the opportunities expanded by AI and achieving sustained growth.

Director, Executive Officer, COO
Kei Tomioka