NEC is trialling facial recognition payment and agentic AI technology to advance secure, hands-free transactions and autonomous decision-making
What could Japan’s first all-boys boarding school have in common with international border control?
At Kaiyo Academy in Japan’s Aichi prefecture, a convenience store is trialling the same facial recognition technology used at 80 airports globally.
Since 2022, around 600 students aged 12 to 18 and staff have been paying for snacks and stationery with just their faces. The checkpoint-grade system, developed by Japanese electronics and information technology company NEC, verifies their identity through face recognition.
This school trial is part of NEC’s broader push into biometric payments and agentic artificial intelligence (AI). Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can autonomously plan, reason and act towards a goal, going beyond generative AI’s prompt-driven capabilities.
The 126-year-old Japanese company provides a wide range of technologies from network infrastructure to AI solutions to public and private sector clients in over 50 countries.
“If you can trust the (biometric authentication used) for border control, you (should be able to) trust it for banking transactions,” said Suresh Neelakantan, NEC APAC’s head of Innovation and Development for its Digital Finance Solutions and Innovation division.
Source: https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/
