In 2011, Moneyball, a Hollywood movie about how the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team opted to select his players based on data and analytics rather than the gut-feeling of ornery old talent scouts, proved a surprise hit, earning multiple Academy Award nominations and over $100 million at the global box office. Fast forward 15 years and the use of objective data and analytics in place of intuition is becoming ever more mainstream in corporate decision-making. This approach is known as data-driven management (DDM).

In a nod to the movie, Mitsui & Co. (U.S.A.) later nicknamed the initiative “Project Moneyball” as it began to gain traction, following the launch of its own DDM Task Force, initially led by a single employee, in October 2022. And, appropriately enough, the task force is based not in Japan, but in the United States. Why? First, because the US is home to all the leading cloud-based data warehousing providers, and AI and analytics platforms. Second, because Mitsui's Americas Business Unit sits at the critical intersection of the company's business and regional axes. And third, because barriers between business units are low, with a deeply rooted open culture of making bottom-up proposals.

The first step the DDM Task Force needed to take was to win over the key AI and data platforms. The platform companies knew little about Mitsui and needed to be persuaded that forging partnerships with it was actually worth their while. Mitsui's case went something like this: Mitsui is a conglomerate made up of literally hundreds of group companies. Each of these group companies has hands-on operational expertise in different fields, giving them access to unique datasets in sectors where leveraging data has yet to become routine. Bringing DDM to bear could not only enhance the group companies' corporate value by increasing their revenues, lowering their costs or reducing their risk, it could also create combinatory value for Mitsui & Co. as a whole by building a group-wide data and AI ecosystem.

DDM goes trucking

A quick case study is probably the simplest way to grasp DDM's benefits. Mitsui, which has designated mobility as a key growth area, acquired Taylor & Martin, the market-leading truck auction company in the United States, in April 2024. On the very same day the deal went through, representatives from the Mitsui DDM Team met with Taylor & Martin's management to discuss how best to extract value from the company's unique dataset. Developing a price predictor was one of the first ideas that Taylor & Martin and Mitsui came up with.

A few years earlier, driven by pandemic-era prohibitions on in-person gatherings, Taylor & Martin had switched from live regional auctions to online national auctions. This switchover had placed a treasure trove of data in the company's hands—not just which customer won a specific auction, but also how much the non-winning customers bid for specific truck models in specific market conditions.

Working on Mitsui's group-wide DDM Platform, which it had developed with its partners, the Mitsui DDM Team applied machine learning and AI to Taylor & Martin's auction data to create a price prediction tool. Crucially, the price predictor can be accessed by staff via a simple interface on their own portable devices. It is a win-win, with salespeople, regardless of experience, able to quickly offer precise price predictions and targeted recommendations to happy customers.

This predictor tool, however, represents only the first step in what Mitsui calls the democratization of data. Now that people on the Taylor & Martin frontline are familiar with the everyday use of analytics, they can independently figure out new ways to extract value from their data using automated tools with only minimal support from specialized engineers. This creates a flywheel effect, making Mitsui group companies' DDM initiatives self-sustaining.

As part of this democratization drive, Mitsui introduced a DDM Day in 2024, where frontline staff from group companies—not engineers—talked about the data-driven projects they were implementing to their peers in other group companies. In 2025, six Mitsui group companies presented to a combined online-offline audience of over 400, while a second day was added during which Mitsui's tech partners offered hands-on training. Topics covered included demand forecasting in the wholesale industry, and the use of AI to automate operations in the service industry.

Cross-group, company-wide and global

To take things to the next level, Mitsui established the Global DDM Task Force at the Tokyo headquarters in September 2025, which has now been formalized into the Group Data Driven Management Strategy Department as of April 2026.

The department is currently overseeing 150+ data projects across more than 100 organizations, including Mitsui Group companies and internal business divisions. It's also expanding geographically. Now, in addition to the New York and Sao Paulo teams which handle the Americas, there are teams in London (Europe), Dubai (Middle East and Africa), Singapore (Asia ex-Japan), and Tokyo.

Mitsui is also starting to apply DDM not just within individual group companies but across multiple group companies. How does that work? Active both upstream and downstream in multiple business segments, Mitsui's different group companies' operations often touch upon different stages of the same supply chain. Steelmaking and auto retailing is one good example of this. For example, sales data from an auto retailer could potentially provide valuable signals about movements in the steel market, creating a possible source of competitive advantage for an upstream steelmaker. The idea is to apply that approach across all sorts of supply chains to provide Mitsui's 475 group companies with exclusive leading indicators that should help them navigate their markets better.

The DDM roadmap is envisioned in three phases: "Points, Lines, and Network." Mitsui is currently in the "points" and "lines" phases, which involve the democratization of data and AI for frontline implementation and the development of more sophisticated management through deeper collaboration with the Mitsui head office. In the final "network" phase, the scope will expand to developing intra-group ecosystems. The goal is to transcend individual business boundaries and create combinatory value by strategically connecting businesses across industries and regions.

DDM Roadmap

DDM starts with democratized use cases at the frontline (“Points”), expands through real-time collaboration between Mitsui & Co. and its group companies (“Lines”), and ultimately evolves into cross-business value creation across the Mitsui Group (“Network”).

Investors sometimes view highly diversified companies as no more than the sum of their standalone parts. Mitsui, however, is living proof that the whole can be far more than that. By using DDM to optimize individual group companies' performance, share valuable data and AI widely, and elevate decision-making, Mitsui is taking an innovative approach that will significantly boost corporate value by unlocking true "combinatory value."