Rakuten and HP bring Hybrid AI to Japan with the launch of Rakuten AI for Desktop
This summer marks a new chapter in how people in Japan experience AI on their personal computers. On July 29th, Rakuten Group and HP officially launched Rakuten AI for Desktop, a hybrid AI application bundled with eligible HP PCs in Japan. The result is an experience that offers the privacy and cost efficiency of on-device intelligence along with Rakuten’s cloud-connected ecosystem — all from a single interface.
The shift to Hybrid AI and on-device intelligence
As AI becomes part of everyday life, individuals and businesses alike are looking for smarter and more efficient tools without compromising on cost, connectivity, or privacy. Rakuten AI for Desktop eliminates these trade-offs, giving users the flexibility to access AI when, where and how they want.
With this launch, customers can easily switch between two modes:
- On-device Mode — Powered by Rakuten AI 7B ONNX, a specially optimized version of Rakuten’s Japanese-optimized large language model that runs locally on HP’s AI PC hardware. This mode delivers private, efficient assistance for tasks like rewriting, summarizing, and translation — with no dependency on an internet connection.
- Cloud Mode — Connects users to Rakuten’s specialized agents and the wider Rakuten Ecosystem, enabling everything from shopping and travel booking to managing Rakuten Points, all within one conversational interface.
“Talking with AI is fast becoming something people can’t live without,” said Ting Cai, Chief AI & Data Officer at Rakuten Group. “Our vision is to make intelligence available wherever you are — online or offline, on a plane or in an emergency — so you have peace of mind that intelligence is always with you.”
AI that works the way you do
Rather than functioning as a separate application, Rakuten AI for Desktop is designed to live inside the daily workflow:
- AI Chat Window — a central hub for interacting with agents spanning Rakuten Ichiba, Rakuten Travel, Rakuten Mobile, Rakuten Music, Rakuten Point Club, and more.
- Floating Icon and System Tray — a draggable shortcut that keeps AI assistance one click away, no matter what else is open on screen.
- Contextual Action Bar — surfaces relevant suggestions automatically, so tasks like summarizing a document or rewriting an email take a fraction of the usual effort.
Together, these tools cut down on the tab-switching and copy-pasting that typically slow people down, letting AI assistance meet users exactly where they’re already working.
A growing ecosystem of agents
Cloud Mode unlocks a wide set of specialized agents beyond the core writing, translation, and summarization tools. On the productivity side, that includes AI search, image and video generation, voice memo transcription, a coding assistant, and a general-purpose problem solver. On the Rakuten Ecosystem side, dedicated agents cover Ichiba shopping, Travel bookings, Music discovery, Mobile presale support, Point Club balances, and GORA golf course search.
There’s also a set of community-oriented agents built for everyday life outside of work — including an Anime Senpai for anime chat and recommendations, a Life and Career Coach, an Adventure Planner, an English Teacher, a Cooking Partner, a Dating Advisor, a Fashion Style Advisor, a Fitness Coach, a Fortune Teller, and a Pet Consultant.
When high performance hardware meets intelligent AI solutions
This milestone launch is just the start of the next wave of AI PCs that is unlikely to be built by any single company alone. Hardware makers understand devices; platform companies understand the services people actually use every day — and pairing the two is what turns “AI-capable hardware” into an AI experience people reach for. That’s the thinking behind the Rakuten-HP collaboration, first announced in November 2025: by combining HP’s hardware and PC platform expertise with Rakuten’s AI models and 70-plus-service ecosystem, the two companies set out to create devices that feel genuinely integrated with the way people already shop, travel, communicate, and get things done online.
“As AI becomes a natural part of everyday work and life, customers want experiences that are intelligent, secure and seamlessly integrated into the devices they use every day,” said Nobuki Okado, Managing Director of HP Japan. “This collaboration demonstrates how AI PCs will become the foundation for the future of work by intelligently combining on-device and cloud AI.”
Getting started
Setup is simple:
- Click the Rakuten AI icon on the taskbar or Start menu to open the Rakuten AI for Desktop site.
- Follow the prompts to download the application.
- Launch the app and use the cloud/on-device toggle to check whether your device supports on-device mode.
- If supported, install on-device mode from the settings page.
Availability
Rakuten AI for Desktop is available starting July 29, 2026, with eligible HP PCs for enterprise customers in Japan. Consumer availability follows in October 2026. Eligible devices include HP Windows PCs in Japan, excluding gaming PCs, thin clients, and select workstation models.
For more details, visit the Rakuten AI for Desktop official site.
Rakuten AI 7B is a 7-billion-parameter Japanese language foundation model continually trained from Mistral-7B-v0.1, an open LLM from Mistral AI, using Rakuten’s in-house multi-node GPU cluster. For HP PCs, Rakuten developed a further fine-tuned and quantized version optimized for on-device performance.
