Panasonic Well

Modern families are drowning in isolation. Two generations ago, your village was extended family down the street. One generation ago, it was neighbors who knew your kids' names. Today? Parents are raising children surrounded by strangers, with no support system in sight.

Yoky Matsuoka and I saw this crisis as an opportunity—rebuild the village digitally.

But Panasonic Well needed more than good intentions. I hired our first Global Head of Research, who had been working on the same problem space for the last few years and immediately expanded everything we thought we knew. The Foundational Family Wellness study gave us the data to prove out the common pattern across families: they aren’t just isolated, they’re overwhelmed and their rates of stress are rising dramatically. As we said on stage, when parenting carries a warning label like a pack of cigarettes you know there’s a problem that needs to be solved.

Then McKinsey research revealed the breaking point: people juggle 5-7 wellness products simultaneously, frustrated with each one individually and furious about how poorly they work together. The solution became obvious—one AI-powered interface integrating everything into a single family experience.

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, we weren't just seeing a new tool—we were seeing the foundation for something entirely different. An intelligent marketplace where AI agents could reshape how families interact with wellness entirely.

That vision became Umi: the superapp strategy that would change everything.

The transformation achieved rapid organizational alignment around Panasonic's most ambitious strategy in decades. In 18 months, we have unified the business leaders behind our AI-native service models and repositioned the company from commodity manufacturer to a rising leader in AI- and data-driven businesses.

We’re less than a year into this 25 year plan, and already the Partner Collective ecosystem is a robust part of the business with 20+ wellness brands signed up, creating the foundation for the AI-powered family wellness economy. Most importantly, we achieved enterprise-wide alignment behind the 25-year Panasonic Go strategy—organizational coherence that had eluded previous transformation attempts.