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OMRON SINIC X, established in 2018, is the R&D arm of the OMRON Group. Guided by the "SINIC Theory" that founder Kazuma Tateishi proposed in 1970, the company works backward from a vision of the near future to research the technologies it will require.
He, a senior Researcher there, works on AI that understands images and video the way humans do. In a Japan facing a declining and aging population, the aim is to ease the burden on the field through AI. ANOSUPO has walked alongside that foundational research through annotation.

Previously, he created data in-house. He built his own platform and hired workers. With crowdsourcing, some people would stop working partway through, so constant checking was unavoidable.
Simple tasks were manageable in-house. But as tasks grew complex, "you have to find annotators you can trust and communicate closely with them." He had used external firms too, but a thought lingered: "there might be a company that annotates the difficult tasks more thoroughly."

The first order was data describing robot failure motions. The more specialized a task, the higher the setup fee tends to be — and that was exactly what he noticed. "They didn't jack up the price just because it was specialized. They did it affordably. That was big." By the second order, he had stopped seeking competing quotes.
Once the collaboration began, ANOSUPO designed a dedicated annotation UI for each project. "When the UI is easy to build and well made, things stay stable." Each tool was refined through review and feedback.

He described the change in terms of time. Compared with what he would have spent hiring and monitoring annotators himself, "it's probably down to under 10%."
On cost, the annotation work itself was about the same as managing it in-house — but since he no longer bears the management overhead that would otherwise be added on, "the cost-performance is very good." On speed, a large team working at a steady pace kept quality stable, too.