Mikitani to engineers: Here’s what’s next
“We need to talk about AI. What is going to happen? To business, to you, to the community, to the country, to the world?”
At the 17th Rakuten Technology Conference, held on November 15, 2025, Rakuten Group Chairman and CEO Mickey Mikitani challenged an auditorium of engineers to rethink their assumptions around AI. The theme of the day: AI-nization with U.
“Is this another incremental innovation, or is it the fourth industrial revolution? Or is it something even bigger? Something fundamentally different?”
AI is about data, execution and talent
Mikitani broke down his perspective on AI into three key points. First: data.
“Rakuten is very unique in terms of the ownership of data,” Mikitani said. While many AI leaders rely mostly publicly available data for training, Rakuten leverages valuable transactional and behavioral data for its models.”
With over 70 different services in operation in Japan, Rakuten has access to an unparalleled data trove.
“Globally we have over 2 billion members. In Japan, we have 45 million monthly active users – meaning they actually transact. Maybe they use Rakuten Card, or Rakuten Ichiba, or Rakuten Bank. [Approximately] half the adults in Japan use Rakuten every month.”
But data is worth little without Mikitani’s second point: execution. He highlighted a few ways Rakuten is already putting AI to work.
“For Rakuten Pet Insurance, we used AI to improve efficiency by 28 percent and shorten processing time,” he revealed. “Rakuten Securities is providing AI stock analysis, analyzing 8,500 U.S. and Japanese stocks.”
Rakuten Ichiba and Rakuten Travel users also have access to personalized agents to help them shop and plan.
“For Rakuten Mobile, besides automated network management and automated recovery, we reduced electricity use by 20 percent. If all mobile companies did that, tens of billions of dollars would be saved.”
And the final piece of Mikitani’s AI trio: talent. “We believe hiring top talent is going to be key.”
Mikitani revealed that Rakuten will be assigning a Chief AI Officer to every business unit to help further accelerate AI adoption.
“Over 90% of Rakuten employees are users of our Rakuten AI for Rakutenians platform. We’ve created over 20,000 AI templates. Token usage has increased 17 times from last year,” he told the conference. “People use AI for knowledge management, search, planning, translation, QA, everything.”
It’s this level of employee buy-in that will make a company stand out in the AI-driven age. “Every single employee needs to really believe, if you can’t use AI, it will be difficult to thrive.”
Rakuten Mobile‘s ecosystem impact
At the foundation of Rakuten’s AI transformation is another major undertaking: connectivity. Now more than five years into full operation, the impact of Rakuten Mobile on the company has made itself clear.
“The reason we started this project is because mobile bills were becoming too expensive,” he explained. “That wasn’t good for many industries – for consumers, for tourism, for retail.”
Today, it enjoys some of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the industry, and has become a core pillar of the Rakuten Ecosystem.
“When Rakuten members join Rakuten Mobile, they spend 50 percent more [on Rakuten Ichiba]. They spend 30 percent more with Rakuten Card. The nurturing effect of Rakuten Mobile on our ecosystem is very significant.”
Blazing a trail into a new age
“We’ve always been the trailblazer, or disruptor; a crazy company trying to do new things. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail.”
Over a decade ago, Mikitani’s Englishnization initiative pushed the company through a linguistic transformation, a gambit which is paying off in the tussle for AI talent.
“We have more than 4,000 engineers in India. We have Viber in Israel and Ukraine, Rakuten France, Rakuten TV in Barcelona, Kobo in Canada, Viki, and our ad business in Silicon Valley.”
As Rakuten becomes a “federation of global companies,” Mikitani challenged the conference to ponder how business should look in an AI-driven future.
“I think we can overlap what we did with our language transformation,” he said. “The way we manage business before and after the AI revolution: Will it be the same?”
