Rakuten AI in 2025: Embracing Agentic AI

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2025 marked Rakuten AI's pivotal transformation into a full-fledged agentic platform, empowering users across the Rakuten Ecosystem.

In 2025, Rakuten AI went through a pivotal transformation, evolving from a burgeoning collection of GenAI solutions to a full-fledged agentic platform dedicated to empowering users across the Rakuten Ecosystem. We celebrated new milestones along the way from the full-scale launch of the agentic Rakuten AI platform to our selection for the Generative AI Accelerator Challenge (GENIAC) project to develop next-gen Japanese large language models (LLMs), and our collaboration with HP to integrate Rakuten AI on-device capabilities on HP PCs.

Building on our proven track record, Rakuten continues to lead the way in building AI that is optimized for Japanese language and culture, offering superior efficiency and value for businesses, customers and society.

Join us as we reflect on some of our most exciting AI wins in 2025.

January

2025 at Rakuten started with a bang with the traditional kagami-biraki (sake barrel-opening) ceremony at the company’s Tokyo HQ followed by Rakuten Group Chairman and CEO Mickey Mikitani’s annual New Year’s address. Mikitani took the opportunity to double down on Rakuten’s AI-nization initiative, designed to integrate AI into all company operations and empower employees through AI education.

Rakuten announces launch of Rakuten AI for Business for corporate customers.

Rakuten Mobile launched a bold new service to empower corporate customers in Japan: Rakuten AI for Business. The service enables companies in Japan large and small to take advantage of generative AI, regardless of technical proficiency. Drawing on Rakuten Group’s own experience in company-wide AI rollout, Rakuten AI for Business is designed to address key challenges businesses in Japan face when implementing AI. These include high costs/lack of expertise, security concerns and underutilization.  

The month ended with the company’s annual Rakuten New Year Conference, gathering Rakuten Ichiba merchants from across the country. Mickey and other leaders shared the strategies and visions shaping the future of Rakuten Ichiba, including examples of AI utilization, enhancements in logistics and more.

February

In February, we released Rakuten AI 2.0, our first Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Japanese LLM, to the open-source community. 8x more powerful than the previous version of the LLM, it quickly achieved a “best-in-class” score. We also made Rakuten AI 2.0 mini, our first small language model (SLM), available from the official Rakuten Group Hugging Face repository.

We also announced a major expansion of our autonomous delivery service with the addition of advanced robots from Avride, a leading developer in the autonomous vehicle and delivery robot industry, as well as an expanded roster of participating stores. The service area has also been expanded in Tokyo with Avride robots joining existing Rakuten delivery robots from Cartken.

Rakuten held our first-ever Rakuten Ad & Marketing Day 2025, a B2B event focusing on advertising and marketing strategies leveraging AI and data. Among the highlights, Daimaru Matsuzakaya Department Store shared how advertisements utilizing Rakuten’s AI and data led to a significant increase in store visits and purchases at their renovated store.

March

At MWC Barcelona, the world’s largest and most influential connectivity event, Rakuten Symphony showcased AI-driven telecom innovations, across its cloud, RAN and OSS solutions, drawing industry interest and spurring conversation on the future of intelligent growth.

Rakuten GORA launches AI golf swing analysis tool.

Later in March, Rakuten GORA launched a new AI golf swing analysis tool on the Rakuten Golf ScoreManagement App. Developed in cooperation with computer vision experts from Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT), Keio University’s Aoki Media Sensing Lab, and Rakuten India, the tool allows users to upload a video of their golf swing for in-depth analysis.

April

Rakuten announced the establishment of Rakuten Tech Center Europe with a special launch event at its Paris office. The new tech entity serves as a hub in the region, uniting a diverse and highly skilled team of more than 50 employees. Members encompass a wide range of expertise, including specialists in AI, data center operations, cloud computing, platform development, IT support – as well as members of Rakuten Institute of Technology, the company’s incubation center for AI research and other cutting-edge technologies.

Rakuten India hosted Rakuten Product Conference 2025 under the theme: Machine Speed, Human Ingenuity. Speakers, including NVIDIA Managing Director of South Asia Vishal Dhupar, commented on the future of AI in tech at a hybrid event that gathered over 20,000 people.

May

In May, Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony, announced the deployment of an in-house developed RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) platform in Rakuten’s 4G and 5G Open RAN mobile network in Japan. The deployment, one of the world’s first nationwide RIC platforms in commercial use in an Open RAN mobile network, is expected to enable up to 20% reduction in network energy consumption and marks a significant step towards more sustainable and intelligent mobile networks of the future.

Rakuten General Insurance introduced an industry-first AI Avatar (beta version) into its Drive Assist personal auto insurance estimation simulation. The AI Avatar’s interactive experience aims to reduce user hesitation towards online insurance enrollment.

Rakuten General Insurance launches AI Avatar
Rakuten General Insurance launches AI Avatar.

June

Rakuten Mobile, AWL, Inc. and Rakuten Vissel Kobe were selected for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Regional Digital Transformation (DX) Promotion Package Project (AI Verification Type), in an initiative managed by Mitsubishi Research Institute. The initiative integrates AWL’s intelligent camera solutions, Rakuten Mobile’s advanced network infrastructure and innovative AI algorithms at events held at Noevir Stadium Kobe, home of Vissel Kobe, the Rakuten Group’s professional soccer club. Together, the companies launched a joint demonstration in Kobe City focused on using Edge AI technology to optimize communication loads in large-scale venues

Rakuten announced that it successfully used Anthropic’s AI coding agent, Claude Code, to transform software development, enabling engineering teams to automate coding tasks that accelerate time to market while reliably powering AI features for millions of customers.

Rakuten transforms software development with Anthropic’s Claude Code.

This year we joined the AI & Data track at DTW Ignite 2025, one of Europe’s premier telecom industry events. Ting Cai, Chief AI & Data Officer at Rakuten Group, delivered a captivating keynote address, charting Rakuten’s innovative AI-nization strategy and its transformative impact on the mobile industry.

July

In July, Rakuten announced our selection for the third term of the Generative AI Accelerator Challenge (GENIAC) project promoted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) with the aim of strengthening Japan’s generative AI development.

As part of the project, Rakuten began R&D in August 2025 on a cutting-edge, open-weight AI foundation model, which will integrate new techniques that significantly expand the language model’s memory capabilities – effectively increasing the information it can access when generating responses. Rakuten is leveraging these techniques to overcome current limitations in generative AI memory, developing a model that offers vastly improved recall and performance.

In 2025, our annual flagship conference was renamed Rakuten AI Optimism, signaling how AI has become deeply woven into the Rakuten Ecosystem. Held at Pacifico Yokohama from July 30 to August 1, 2025, the event gathered tens of thousands of business professionals, partners and innovators from across the globe.

Rakuten announces full-scale launch of Rakuten AI, an intelligent platform available to the public at https://ai.rakuten.co.jp/chat.

On Day 1 of the event, Rakuten and Rakuten Mobile announced the full-scale launch of Rakuten AI, a new cutting-edge AI agent designed to enhance user experiences and streamline interactions across the Rakuten Ecosystem, as well as enrich and empower daily life.

Rakuten AI is an essential gateway seamlessly integrated with the expansive Rakuten Ecosystem, spanning diverse sectors including shopping, lifestyle, fintech, travel, education, work, wellness and entertainment.

During Mickey Mikitani’s opening keynote, he touched on how AI is transforming the Rakuten Ecosystem and unveiled Rakuten AI as the next step our development of agentic AI. Ting Cai welcomed guests from across the company to demo Rakuten AI onstage, showcasing the platforms power to help with everything from making a business plan to helping with math homework.

In addition to keynotes, Rakuten AI leaders and industry partners particpated in onstage panel discussions that covered everything from AI solutions for a national cancer treatment institution, AI for telecom.

September

In September, Rakuten Travel launched the Rakuten Travel AI Hotel Search, an AI agent that offers tailored hotel recommendations to users leveraging data from Rakuten Travel’s robust reviews and booking trends based on vast amounts of data and diverse accommodation plans.

Rakuten Travel launches Rakuten Travel AI Hotel Search.

The AI agent’s key features include the ability to understand natural language and accurately grasp user requests, optimized recommendations including web search results to supplement Rakuten Travel’s analysis data, as well as a user-friendly display for users to compare multiple options either in a list or on a map.

Tomotaka Torin, President and CEO at Rakuten Bank, sat down with our team to talk about the background and strategy behind organizational reforms at Rakuten Bank in the era of AI, including the establishment of a new Marketing Division and the strengthening of the sales organization, amidst an intensifying competitive landscape.

October

Rakuten Rakuma, our community-powered marketplace app, launched a feature that utilizes AI to analyze images uploaded by users listing products and automatically recommends highly relevant categories, product names and product descriptions.

Rakuten Rakuma launches new AI-powered feature.

In addition, the feature leverages part of the data from Komehyo, a Rakuma Saikyo Kantei authentication service partner, with annual distribution of 2.4 million second-hand brand products. This supports product information recommendations from over 100 luxury brands, in addition to Rakuten’s existing product data.

We launched Rakuten’s “Future Purchase Prediction” is an innovative service that leverages vast data from over 70 Rakuten services as well as advertisers, enabling AI to identify demand unpredictable by humans and forecast future buyers.

November

Rakuten and HP Japan announced their intent to integrate Rakuten AI on-device capabilities to HP PCs across Japan. Rakuten AI is a next-generation agentic AI platform designed to enhance productivity, support smarter decision-making and enable intuitive human-AI collaboration. This is the first time that Rakuten AI will be available for use offline and online with an on-device Rakuten large language model (LLM).

Rakuten announces collaboration with HP Japan to bring Rakuten AI for Desktop to users from Spring to Summer 2026.

The desktop version of Rakuten AI will run Rakuten’s efficient, Japanese-optimized LLMs on HP devices, enabling private and sensitive tasks to run locally. This hybrid approach leverages intelligent routing to determine which agent and model to use whether on the cloud, edge or device. Users benefit from seamless continuity offline while minimizing cloud reliance to achieve improved performance and meaningful cost savings.

We also hosted our 17th annual Rakuten Technology Conference to celebrate AI innovation with industry partners and attendees.

December

Rakuten launches Rakuten AI 3.0, the company’s largest LLM to-date.

Building on the success of Rakuten AI 2.0, our first MoE model, we unveiled our latest and largest AI model optimized for Japanese speakers: Rakuten AI 3.0. The new models is around 700B in size featuring both high efficiency and performance. It is available for use across Rakuten services, through the Rakuten AI Gateway internal platform, and will be rolled out through the Rakuten AI agentic platform to other Rakuten services. 

Rakuten and Rakuten Mobile were awarded the Information Technology Award (Customer Experience Innovation Field) in the Japan Institute of Information Technology’s 43rd IT Awards in 2025 for development of the Rakuten Mobile AI Assistant 2.0 chat-based customer support service leveraging generative AI.

That’s a wrap for Rakuten’s AI activities in 2025, a year packed with releases and recognitions that has brought us a step closer towards an agentic future. Looking ahead, we will build on our strong momentum to roll out AI to more Rakuten Ecosystem serivces and accelerate agentic AI to benefit users – stay tuned for more Rakuten AI news in 2026!

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