Fujitsu Updates on AI, Consulting and Europe

PAC recently caught up with some of Fujitsu’s European and global leadership at their latest regional Executive Analyst Day in Lisbon.

The Portuguese capital is home to one of the company’s two major delivery centers in Europe, and it was interesting to hear how the vendor is reshaping its regional business, while driving closer links to its Japanese R&D engine. Here are some of the key takeaways from the event:

Strategy: Net Positivity & Wayfinders
Fujitsu is entering into the final 12 months of its latest three-year strategy cycle, and it looks set to start the next one better positioned for growth.

Disposing of low-margin activities and a sharpening up of its global delivery network have helped to drive a bottom-line improvement both at a global and European level, while customer and employee satisfaction scores are both on the rise. The company has long had one of the largest R&D functions in the global tech industry and it invested approximately €770m in the business in its most recent financial year.

One of the key messages from the event was that Fujitsu is going back to its roots and underlining its core identity as a technology company at heart. Key focus areas for investment include the “Uvance” portfolio (its group of horizontal and industry aligned growth solutions) and its cutting-edge propositions in areas such as Quantum computing and artificial intelligence (more on which later).

Importantly, Fujitsu is also building a new customer engagement model to help it join-the-dots between its technology propositions (both proprietary and third-party) with a more consulting-led approach. Fujitsu has no aspirations of building a management consulting wing, but it is looking to add industry and business process experts to the ranks of “Wayfinders” initiative.

Fujitsu has built some real momentum in the way it works with its ecosystem partners in recent years. SAP has named it as one of only a handful of Premium Rise with SAP partners, and it has recently reinforced global alliances with long-term partners Microsoft and ServiceNow.

The latter vendor is a particularly important ally for Fujitsu, which enhanced its capabilities with the purchase of Enable Professional Services, the largest ServiceNow partner in the APAC region. The company also won a deal with France’s Schneider Electric to deliver the world’s largest implementation of ServiceNow’s ITOM solution. Fujitsu is increasingly trying to differentiate with its ecosystem partners by creating joint solutions for specific industries or use cases. It cited the example of a workplace incident prevention tool it built on top of ServiceNow, and which it subsequently sold back to the vendor to bake into its core solution set.

European: Integration & Uvance Momentum
Fujitsu’s European business was the focus for this week’s event, and there have been some big changes in the region.

Fujitsu sold its German on-premise infrastructure services business has integrated some of its country clusters across the region, bringing together its high-performing Spain unit with its Portuguese operation into a single Iberian group, and also driving closer links between its country operations in the Benelux region.

So, in which areas can Fujitsu help European clients? The company remains best-known in the infrastructure services space, and it continues to rank as one of the largest providers of workplace, cyber security service desk services in the region. Across all of these areas, Fujitsu’s European clients have benefited from harnessing the group’s 30,000 global delivery network, which is helping it to drive scale, efficiency and performance through the use of AI and automation.

Fujitsu’s biggest area of activity in the region is in helping clients modernize increasingly critical workloads into multi-cloud environment (including major projects with the Estonian Health Insurance Fund and Spanish transport infrastructure group Abertis) and as at group level, it has some strong clusters of skills and offerings around AWS, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Salesforce and SAP.

More than one third of its revenue in the region now comes from the Uvance portfolio, and Fujitsu has taken steps to consolidate some of its home-grown offerings across the region in order to drive greater consistency and reduce replication. One of the most compelling examples of Uvance in action is its work with a regional health authority in Spain, where Fujitsu has helped it to create an AI-enabled platform of genomic data that is enabling the client to provide more tailored treatment to citizens.

Healthcare and life sciences is one of four main industry clusters that drives the majority of Fujitsu’s European revenue, along with manufacturing and utilities; government and transportation; and retail and hospitality. The company has deepened its domain expertise in the retail sector with the acquisition of software firm GK, and Fujitsu includes a large number of industry specialists within the ranks of the 1,000+ consulting team across the region.

AI: Cohere & Sovereignty
Of particular interest to PAC at the Fujitsu event was a discussion on an AI-related strategic partnership between Fujitsu and Cohere, a Canadian-based deep-learning AI company. In the evolving landscape of enterprise AI, sovereignty, security, and control over data have rapidly become as paramount of importance and concern for European organisations as the opportunity of AI itself.

PAC considers Fujitsu’s strategic partnership with Cohere a significant development that could shape the future of AI adoption for organisations seeking robust, privacy-focused solutions. For European organisations, PAC considers the appeal of sovereign AI solutions clear because data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, demand strict compliance, and reliance on foreign, general-purpose deep learning AI models can present governance, security, and transparency challenges. The partnership between Fujitsu and Cohere is particularly noteworthy as it addresses these concerns with an enterprise-grade AI model that is powerful and designed for deployment in private cloud environments.

Fujitsu’s investment in a solution they have created called Takane, an advanced Japanese language model built on Cohere’s Command R+ LLM, underscores a growing trend in AI solutions tailored to specific linguistic and industry requirements. While this partnership initially focuses on Japanese enterprises, its implications extend beyond Japan. European organisations requiring sovereign AI solutions—financial institutions, government agencies, and pharmaceuticals, for example—will recognise the value in models trained with security, transparency, and private cloud deployment in mind.

Moreover, PAC considers that Cohere’s emphasis on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to mitigate AI hallucinations is crucial for organisations that rely on accuracy, particularly in regulated sectors. This approach aligns with the increasing demand in Europe for AI that is not just generative but verifiable, reducing the risks associated with misinformation and bias. Fujitsu’s strategy of delivering AI through its Uvance cross-industry business model also aligns with a broader shift PAC is witnessing towards outcome-based AI engagements through industry-specific AI services. As European organisations seek AI models that align with local regulatory frameworks and operational needs, PAC considers partnerships like this to offer a glimpse into how AI providers can balance innovation with compliance.

As PAC observes, the growing importance of sovereign AI within the European market also allows regional deep learning AI competitors to develop, like Mistral in France and Aleph Alpha in Germany, competing with likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Ultimately, Fujitsu and Cohere’s collaboration signals an important direction for enterprise AI that prioritises security, private deployment, and industry-specific refinement. For European organisations looking to navigate the complexities of AI adoption while maintaining control over their data, this partnership is a compelling model for a sovereign AI strategy.

PAC Opinion
Fujitsu will celebrate its 90TH anniversary later this year and there are signs that it is beginning to close the gaps between its domestic and international operations.

The group has appointed European executives to sit within the CEO office to help shape and execute the global strategy, and key elements of its AI and Quantum proposition are being developed out of Europe through its hub in France and collaborations with academia and government.

The company has doubled-down on its core strategy of having a broader, positive impact on society and the environment, with a commitment to achieve net-positive status by 2030. While short-term focus on sustainability may be impacted by the Trump presidency, there are many clients and prospects that echo Fujitsu’s view that it is ultimately good for business, and this ethos will become an increasingly important differentiator for Fujitsu.