How Japanese consumers are embracing AI
Rakuten has long taken a proactive stance toward the artificial intelligence boom. With AI solutions powering greater efficiency and improved user experiences across the Group and Rakuten employees creating thousands of custom AIs to boost their own workflows, it’s clear that AI has become a core driver for growth inside the company.
But how do customers in Japan feel about this revolutionary tech? To better understand user sentiment around AI, Japanese market research organization MMD Labo carried out a large-scale survey1, on attitudes toward AI in digital services. The results reveal a public that is both curious about the potential of AI and cautious about where and how it should be used.
Divides across age, gender
The survey gathered data from 5,000 people across Japan between the ages of 18 and 69. A familiar pattern quickly emerged: younger respondents were generally more open to AI tech, with men more favorable than women across nearly every age group.
Among men aged 18 to 29, 27% said they had no resistance at all to using AI. At the other end of the spectrum, just 9.5% of women in their 60s said the same. Across both genders, enthusiasm for AI declined steadily with age, with women consistently expressing higher levels of hesitation.
On the topic of trust, meanwhile, the data painted a different picture. Participants were asked just how much they would be willing to entrust to AI, from basic recommendations all the way to actual transactions. Male respondents were only around half as willing as their female counterparts to entrust AI with their payment details.
Rakuten users skew enthusiastic
One striking divide emerged not in age or gender, but in familiarity with the Rakuten Ecosystem. The survey grouped respondents by whether they actively used Rakuten services, were merely aware of them, or were completely unfamiliar.
Among those engaged with the Rakuten Ecosystem, 62.5% said they were not averse to AI, compared with just 43.6% of those unfamiliar with Rakuten. Half of regular Rakuten users reported having already used some form of AI, while fewer than 20% of non-users responded the same.
The gap widened even further for advanced use cases. Nearly 30% of Rakuten users indicated they would let AI agents handle entire transactions, compared to only 8.6% of non-users. A similar divide appeared around personal data use, with 37.4% of Rakuten users comfortable with AI leveraging personal information versus 10.3% of non-users.
Tellingly, among those not engaged with Rakuten, the most common reason given for disliking AI was “no particular reason,” suggesting less of an active aversion than a lack of engagement.
Fitting AI into shopping and travel
When asked about online shopping, respondents highlighted several frustrations that AI could potentially help solve: unreliable reviews, difficulty comparing products, and uncertainty over fit or suitability. Many hope for AI that can compare prices across sites, track price drops, and help find items using vague or natural language queries.
These are precisely the pain points Rakuten Ichiba is targeting with the recent launch of its AI concierge. Shoppers can now describe their budgets, preferences and usage scenarios through text, voice and images to get the most relevant possible suggestions from Rakuten Ichiba’s approximately 500 million items.
Travel planning, meanwhile, presents its own challenges. Many respondents expressed that they felt overwhelmed by information, struggling to compare options, assemble complete itineraries, and identify the best timing. AI could help predict prices and crowds, suggest destinations based on preferences, and build end-to-end travel plans.
In September 2025, Rakuten Travel launched its AI Travel Search, a free AI agent that leverages data from the platform’s reviews, trend insights, and diverse hotel plans to provide tailored recommendations. Understanding natural language, the agent provides a user-friendly display, allowing travelers to easily compare multiple relevant options that suit their destination, length of stay, budget, and many other preferences.
What users do and don’t want from AI
The survey shone a light on the high level of convenience AI could provide. It’s clear that many people in Japan see value in AI helping surface options they may not otherwise have found on their own, narrowing down overwhelming choices and speeding up comparisons.
But respondents were equally clear about the potential drawbacks of AI. Most common among the concerns were that AI cannot take responsibility for mistakes; that it has been portrayed negatively in the media; and that it still feels too abstract or irrelevant in everyday life.
So what would make AI tools more acceptable? The data suggests three main areas: strong security and privacy protections, a high level of accuracy, and clear proof of work to back up AI-generated outputs. The black-box approach to AI remains an area of apprehension among Japanese users.
Trust is earned through familiarity, transparency, and the notion that somewhere, there remains a human in the loop who can take accountability. The challenge for companies offering AI tools does not seem to be one of raw computing power, but of safety, unambiguity, and real utility.
1 MMD Labo, Consumer Attitudes Toward AI Utilization Survey (November 14–17, 2025). Online survey of 5,000 respondents aged 18–69 across Japan. The survey results can be found on the MDD Labo website:
https://mmdlabo.jp/investigation/detail_2505.html
https://mmdlabo.jp/investigation/detail_2506.html
https://mmdlabo.jp/investigation/detail_2507.html
