Aconnect AI Agents for Manufacturing R&D

Stockmark Inc. is a Tokyo company founded on 15 November 2016 that applies natural language processing and generative AI to enterprise knowledge management. It develops its own Japanese generative AI foundation and enterprise-specific models, and offers Anews for searching internal and external information, SAT for structuring data into company assets, and Aconnect for manufacturing R&D.

Aconnect is an AI agent service for manufacturers that collects and analyzes business news, academic papers, patents and internal documents on the user's behalf. Its agents cover information gathering, technology exploration that maps candidate solutions in a logic tree and links them to internal reports and experiment data, and patent search that extracts technical components and rates the relevance of prior art. Agents added in 2026 as beta PoCs generate experiment reports from Excel data and support failure mode and effects analysis, including design FMEA. Users include Lion, and IHI Plant tested the patent agent.

• Information gathering agent: collects business news, papers, patents and internal documents and summarizes them for teams.
• Technology exploration agent: proposes solution approaches from papers and news and maps them in a logic-tree view.
• Internal knowledge link: connects internal reports and experiment data with external papers and patents.
• Patent search agent: extracts components of a planned technology and rates the relevance of related patents with rationale.
• Experiment report agent (beta): turns Excel experiment data into formatted reports, asking for missing details.
• FMEA agent (beta): generates failure modes and improvement plans using public data and past failure cases.

Japanese electronics and auto parts makers in Vietnam can use the FMEA and experiment report agents to standardize quality documentation in local plants. Vietnamese manufacturers developing new materials or products can run prior-art patent checks before investing in development. Consumer goods companies can speed up market and trend research for new product concepts.

Lion reports that market and trend research that took several days now takes minutes, freeing time for hypothesis testing. Stockmark states that technology and patent research that took days to weeks is shortened, with earlier detection of rework and patent risk. Linking internal know-how to external papers and patents reduces dependence on individual experts. The service is covered by ISO/IEC 27017 certification.

Manufacturers face shorter product cycles and retiring senior engineers, so they are turning to AI agents that capture tacit know-how and speed up research, patent checks and quality analysis. Japanese manufacturers run large R&D and production operations in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, where engineering teams increasingly need the same tools as headquarters.

Stockmark Inc. was founded on 15 November 2016 and is headquartered in Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO Tatsu Hayashi. It holds ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27701, and ISO/IEC 27017 covering Aconnect and SAT Agent Cockpit (BSI Japan). Other products are Anews, SAT and enterprise-specific generative AI development.