Hello! I’m @mikichin from the Mercari Engineering Office.
On November 13th, we will be holding “mercari GEARS 2025,” the Mercari Group’s tech conference!
After seven years since our last “Mercari Tech Conf 2018,” we are finally returning to an offline event.
The theme of the event is “Mercari’s Engineering Today.”
We will introduce how engineering within the Mercari Group has evolved since 2018 from the perspectives of technology, organization, and culture—covering not only this year’s company-wide theme “AI-Native” but also the broader changes.
There will be no online streaming, so please come to the venue and see and hear it for yourself!!
The venue features three stages—PASSION Stage, GROW Stage, and MECHANISM Stage—inspired by the “Mercari Engineering Principles,” which articulate the shared understanding and beliefs of Mercari’s engineering organization.
This article introduces sessions from the “GROW Stage”!
If you haven’t registered yet, take a look and you will find sessions that will interest you. Please register here.
13:00 – 13:40 Leader’s Talk: Moving Fast Without Breaking Things
Mercari has "Move Fast" as one of its values. At the same time, flexibly enabling developers to work on multiple services is necessary. How can this be achieved?
In this discussion, the Engineering Leaders will talk about how Mercari’s Engineering Organization is taking on the challenge of adapting the development process for the AI era, balancing speed and resiliency.
The talk is mainly conducted in English, but questions in Japanese are welcome too!
14:15 – 14:35 Transforming customer engagement with Google Customer Engagement Suite
At Google Cloud Next Tokyo in 2025, Mercari held a keynote speech and a breakout session on transforming customer engagement using the Customer Engagement Suite provided by Google. In this session, we will introduce how the products presented in that session were built.
14:45 – 15:05 PJ Aurora’s Vision and Automated UI Quality Evaluation Agents
PJ Aurora’s mission: to change Mercari’s approach to product design. In this session, we will introduce our vision for the project, as well as the current state of our work on AI agent development to automate UI quality evaluation. We will share our efforts to explore the potential of quality assurance in the AI-Native era.
15:15 – 15:35 Why Mercari Said No to No-Code: Leveraging LLMs to Reduce Internal Inquiry Response Work by 60%
Amid the generative AI boom, while many companies are trying no-code tools, Mercari has pursued high accuracy and flexibility by thoroughly finetuning existing generative LLMs using inhouse data. In this session, we will provide an exclusive look at Mercari’s unique technical solutions, the value they provide over no-code tools, and our vision behind them, specifically introducing the case study of HiYo-Chan, an inhouse AI chatbot that reduced the work of responding to internal inquiries by 60%.
16:00 – 16:40 The Journey to AI-Native: Driving Company-Wide Adoption Through Data and Practice
Mercari Group is taking on the challenge of creating a new AI based development paradigm on the journey to becoming an AI-Native company.
We are promoting a company-wide initiative to reconstruct the entire development series from planning to implementation, not by using AI as a mere efficiency tool, but by integrating it into the core of our process design.
In this session, we will share a detailed overview of our initiatives using data and examples.
First, we will visualize the spread of AI utilization and changes in productivity based on quantitative data from DX, and look back on the evolution of AI integration as an organizational culture.
Next, we will share the organizational design and operation for scaling AI Agent-based development with high reproducibility, the practice of evolving the development structure of existing businesses to be AI-Native, and the knowledge and challenges gained in the process.
Finally, using new business development as an example, we will introduce the latest development process in which PMs and engineers use generative AI to seamlessly advance from requirements definition to implementation, along with the contents of the standardized document, the ""Agent Spec.""
We will bring you to the forefront of Mercari’s challenge to become AI-Native – transforming the nature of development with AI, aiming to achieve reproducible improvements in productivity.
17:00 – 17:30 LTセッション
- Developer’s Database Operation Issues Revealed through Surveys and Repository Analysis / Tomoyuki Koyama
- Specs to Code with Coding Agents: Where Do Engineers Come In? / Toshiki Kawamura
- Mercari Ads Optimizations For Profitable Revenue Stream / Kumar Abhinav
- Exploring LLM-Driven Formal Verification for Robust Continuous Integration of Services / Cheng-Hui Weng
- Evaluations for LLM Apps / jd
Apply for “mercari GEARS 2025” here.
For details on other sessions, please see below.
PASSION Stage session details are here.
MECHANISM Stage session details are here.
Event Details
Event Date and Time：
November 13th (Thu), 2025 11:00-18:00
Overview：
mercari GEARS 2025 is a tech event that invites you to experience the culture and technical challenges of Mercari’s Engineering Organization first-hand.
More than a series of information-sharing sessions, the event is a place for engineers to meet, share their experiences, and create new opportunities through interaction.
Held on November 13th, the event caters to software engineers working at tech companies and people interested in Mercari Group’s technologies.
Participation fee: Free
Venue：TODA HALL & CONFERENCE TOKYO
How to Participate: Please register on this page.
【Official Site】
For any additional information about this event, we will announce it on @MercariGears as it becomes available. If you’re interested, please follow us.
