Mizuho Financial Group Inc. is giving all its Japan bank employees access to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure OpenAI service this week, making it one of the country’s first financial firms to adopt the potentially transformative generative artificial intelligence technology.

The banking giant will allow 45,000 workers at its core lending units in the country to test out the service, according to Toshitake Ushiwatari, general manager of Japan’s third largest bank’s digital planning department. Already, managers and rank-and-file employees are submitting dozens of pitches for ways to harness the technology even before the software is installed.

There are many staff who are embracing ChatGPT in their private lives, Ushiwatari said in an interview. “It’s like poking a beehive,” he said, referring to the enthusiastic response the firm’s move has sparked. “They think it will completely re-set the world, triggering disruptive innovation.”

The developments at Mizuho and its peers come as Wall Street grapples with the unfolding AI revolution and its impact. Within global banks, some have clamped down on ChatGPT for employees, even as they use AI for business purposes such as scanning wealthy client portfolios and screening for potential defaulters. Japanese financial firms, by contrast, appear to be adopting a more permissive stance internally.

Ushiwatari’s team plans to hold a so-called “ideathon” within the firm in Japan as early as next month and is brainstorming various ways to encourage employees to experiment with the technology. The tool will be introduced to its brokerage unit in the country next month, he said.

So far, one of the ideas being floated is to use generative AI — in which AI models analyze volumes of data and use it to generate new images, texts, audio and video — as a one-stop reference point for the bank’s vast trove of internal rules, processes and other manuals.

Ushiwatari has a rare background for a career-long banker. He went to one of Japan’s most prestigious science schools, Tokyo Institute of Technology, because he wanted to become a rocket scientist. But he switched career ambitions, joining what is today’s Mizuho and has stayed for nearly three decades.

He said he is well aware of the risks of generative AI and the bank is introducing guidelines when it rolls out the technology to employees, such as information management, intellectual property and ethics.

Still, generative AI is something that will lift society and the bank cannot shy away from, according to Ushiwatari. “This is something we have to do, otherwise, we get left behind,” he said.

--With assistance from Takaaki Iwabu.