Fukui Prefecture Gives All 5,400 Staff PKSHA’s YOMEL Minutes AI and Saves About 434 Hours in Two Months
Fukui Prefecture has made PKSHA Infinity's AI minute-taking tool YOMEL available to all of its roughly 5,400 employees and estimates that it cut about 434 hours from the work of writing minutes in the first two months, Mynavi's TECH+ reported on October 23, citing a case study the Fukuoka-based company released the same day.
Before the rollout, prefectural staff stitched together separate transcription tools and generative AI services to produce minutes. The process involved many steps, weighed on employees and gave uneven results depending on who wrote the record. The prefecture's DX promotion division looked for one tool the whole government could use and chose YOMEL because recording starts with a single button during a meeting, with no audio files to upload afterwards, and because of the accuracy of its transcripts and summaries.
YOMEL runs as an installed app alongside Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, so existing meeting systems stay as they are, and it uses PKSHA's in-house speech recognition engine, Olaris, which handles natural conversation and separates speakers automatically. Fukui gave every employee a short manual before launch and says it received no questions about how to use the tool. Use spread from internal meetings to sessions with municipalities and businesses, reaching about 1,040 hours in two months. Minutes are ready right after a meeting, so other departments get information sooner, and administrators can check monthly use by department.
What it means in practice
Meeting records are one of the most common places Japanese local governments use generative AI. PKSHA cites internal affairs ministry data ranking minute summaries as the second most common use, and a ministry study group's projection that local government workforces could fall to half of today's level by 2040. The value for Fukui lies less in one product than in making AI an everyday tool for staff who are not specialists. The national government is moving the same way, with the Digital Agency opening AI agent tools to 180,000 officials in Gennai, and large employers such as NTT Docomo Business are spreading AI assistants across their units.
Fukui acknowledges that adoption is uneven and that some departments are not yet making full use of the tool. It now plans to encourage YOMEL for short meetings and informal notes as well as formal minutes. PKSHA says YOMEL had been adopted by more than 2,000 companies as of the end of March 2026.
What to watch: whether other prefectures publish comparable time-saving figures, and how they check accuracy and handle retention once AI-generated minutes become part of official records.