Tonosho Town, Chiba Prefecture and NTT East  Chiba  held a DX experience session for town employees on July 4th.
Tonosho Town established a DX Promotion Section in April last year. The original staff were also working on other tasks, but from April this year, a dedicated person has been leading the DX initiative.
Miniwa Hirotsugu, DX Promotion Section, said, “We held the experience session to deepen employees’ knowledge of DX. We are not yet at the level where we can envision what DX should look like, so we would like to start by reforming that area”.
Digital tools developed by NTT East Japan were introduced at the experience session. The main focus was on tools that contribute to DX within the town government. Specifically, they introduced WinActor (RPA), which automates routine tasks; AI chatbots, which use AI to automatically respond to inquiries and reduce the burden of staff at the counter; Kintone, which allows for the easy creation of business applications; Shin Autocall, which enables mass communication over the phone; CloudSign, which makes paperless work possible; and Roots Multilingual Translation, an automatic translation service that supports multiple languages.
Tonosho Town has around 120 town employees, and around 100 of them participated in the trial session.
One participant, an employee who manages a community center, said, “We have a lot of part-time employees at the community center, and clocking out is complicated, so we wanted to do something about the manual management. We heard that DX would reduce the workload by about one-tenth, and we’re interested”.
Another commented, “If we use generative AI in dealing with council meetings, we could check past responses and create a rough draft, which would reduce the workload”.
Nozawa Yuki, a member of the Digital Transformation Promotion Section, said, “We believe that this trial session laid the groundwork for digital transformation. We would like to move forward with digital transformation, which is highly requested, while observing the reactions of our employees”.

Minowa said, “We would like to hold trial sessions on a regular basis in the future. This time, we introduced digital tools common to all departments, but we would also like to plan trial sessions tailored to the work of each department, such as introducing digital tools specialized for counter work”.

Tonosho Town’s core industry is agriculture, and its main agricultural products are rice and turnips. As is the case in many areas, the lack of workers due to population decline is becoming a serious issue. For these reasons, digital transformation in agriculture is also on the horizon.

Currently, they are focusing on the use of drones. They are using drones to spray pesticides and to watch over junior high school students who commute to school by bicycle. “We would also like to use drones for disaster prevention,” said Minowa.
“In order to advance on-site DX, we must first secure the resources of town employees. Therefore, our plan is to streamline operations through DX within the town office and then use the time secured there to carry out on-site DX,” said Nozawa.

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