A peek at SoftBank’s strategic secrets in Masayoshi Son’s own words. All 303,513 of them

Masayoshi Son has a lot going on these days.

The SoftBank Group founder oversees the largest technology fund in history and is putting money into ride-hailing, e-commerce, digital payments, satellites, semiconductors, agriculture and cancer detection – just for a start.

How to make sense of it all? Son uses earnings briefings to explain his evolving vision. So ahead of SoftBank’s first-quarter results, Bloomberg News analysed his comments from previous presentations to see how his focus has changed and what may lay ahead.

Natural language processing software helped sift through briefings from the past 12 years, spanning more than 303,000 words. Son has shown impressive fortitude over that stretch: He hasn’t missed a single one of the 48 reports.

Further Reading: SoftBank’s Son to focus on investing to speed up major company shift

Son has sharply increased his references to artificial intelligence in recent months, proclaiming that it will redefine every industry and create many new ones. His comments about AI, robotics and the Internet of Things spiked after SoftBank’s US$32 billion acquisition of chip maker ARM Holdings in 2016.

Now, Son is increasingly turning to the topics as a unifying theme for his wide-ranging deals. Pepper, SoftBank’s humanoid robot, shared the stage with Son in 2015, but has faded in prominence since then.