From the beginning, Inaba spent heavily on research and development without concern for dividends—a corporate mission he described as “walking the narrow path.” But within three years, he and his team of 500 employees were shipping Fujitsu’s first numerical-control machine to Makino Milling Machine Co. In 1972, Fujitsu-Fanuc Ltd.—the “Fanuc” an acronym for Fuji Automatic Numerical Control—was founded as a separate entity, with Inaba in charge. […] The result of Nishikawa’s insight was the Fanuc Intelligent Edge Link and Drive, or Field. The system, introduced in 2016, is an open, cloud-based platform that allows Fanuc to collect global manufacturing data in real time on a previously unimaginable scale and funnel it to self-teaching robots. According to Fanuc, Field has already yielded advancements for tasks such as robotic bin-picking. Previously, the selection of a single part from a bin full of similar parts arranged in random orientations required skilled programmers to “teach” the robots how to perform the task. Now, Fanuc’s robots are teaching themselves. “After 1,000 attempts, the robot has a success rate of 60%,” a company release said. “After 5,000 attempts it can already pick up 90% of all parts—without a single line of program code having to be written.” Fanuc has so far declined to discuss its strategy concerning its venture into AI and machine learning. An employee who would only identify himself as Mr. Tanaka, because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the record, says the company will continue to focus on China. But, he adds, “we cannot rely on our past. As a company, we must adapt to new technology before we can create new technology. This will take time, but it’s necessary—the next generation of products have more functions, more connectivity, and more intelligence.”