TOKYO, Nov 29, 2024 (AFP) - Japanese firm Panasonic has brought back the "God of Management" in AI avatar form, ready to answer all your business questions.

Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, remains one of Japan's most revered entrepreneurs even 35 years after his death aged 94 in 1989.
Panasonic's website even has a list of quotations from Matsushita with words of wisdom on everything from "Do it now" to "Biding your time".

Panasonic said it created the AI avatar "based on the vast amount of recorded speech and audio data from Matsushita's writings, speeches and dialogues".

The purpose is to "explore and enlighten his philosophy and pass it on to the next generation", the electronics company said in a press release on Wednesday.

Responding to a demo question on whether living a good life meant living long, AI Matsushita said: "The secret to a good life is to remember the spirit of youth, to be lively and full of hope."

Matsushita, then 24, founded the firm that would become Panasonic in his two-storey house in Osaka in 1918, producing innovative connectors and two-way sockets.

Pioneering electronic appliances from rice cookers to batteries to video recorders, Panasonic became a global titan with Matsushita making the cover of Time magazine in 1962.

In 2022, Japanese researchers launched an AI Buddha, programmed with around 1,000 teachings from Buddhist texts to answer all manner of deep and meaningful queries.

A Swiss church installed this year a similar AI version of Jesus capable of answering questions from the curious in 100 languages, according to media reports.