Rakuten’s new AI concierge is redefining the shopping experience

After nearly 30 years of searching keywords, Japan’s biggest online marketplace now has a brand-new way to navigate its vast catalog: Rakuten AI. Announced in December 2025, Rakuten Ichiba launched the new agentic AI concierge in its mobile app, giving shoppers a powerful alternative to the static search bar.

Shoppers can engage the concierge in dialogue using text, voice, or even their phone’s camera. They can discuss budget, purpose, usage scenarios and more, asking follow-up questions to narrow down the selection. The concierge even integrates general web search results to stay up to date on real-world factors.

“Ultimately, we aim to move beyond simple purpose-driven shopping,” explains Rakuten Ichiba’s Yusuke Kobayashi Group Managing Executive Officer and Vice Director of Commerce & Marketing Company. “We want to enhance the discovery shopping experience, creating encounters with new products and services that users might not have even realized they wanted, increasing overall joy and satisfaction.”

No more choice paralysis

“Rakuten Ichiba’s appeal lies in its vast selection of about 500 million products and diverse shopfronts, but this abundance can lead to choice paralysis,” Kobayashi notes. “For users with vague needs – those who haven’t settled on a specific product name or brand – traditional keyword searches sometimes fail to lead them to the ideal item.”

Other items might require a level of technical knowledge: “It can be a time-consuming process to gather info, compare specs, and check reviews. Often, a lack of expertise prevents users from making the best choice.”

Rakuten’s new concierge is intended to act as a professional sales consultant that filters through the noise. By summarizing complex information instantly and engaging in meaningful dialogue, the tool aims to find not just a product, but the right product for any given customer.

“The AI concierge engages in dialogue to deeply understand latent needs and lifestyle preferences that surface-level keywords miss,” says Kobayashi. “Interacting with the AI concierge enables it to truly understand individual needs, allowing for highly personalized recommendations from our vast catalog. This eliminates the confusion caused by information overload, enabling users to make confident, satisfying decisions as if they were receiving advice from a professional expert.”

This fundamental transformation of Rakuten Ichiba’s navigation is already yielding significant results.

“In practice, this has reduced the burden of product comparison and led to an approximate 43% reduction in time to purchase. By preventing drop-offs during long searches and guiding users toward products they feel confident in, we have seen an approximate 41% increase in average order value.”^*

Leveraging homegrown expertise

“A long-standing trust in the Rakuten platform, our unique ecosystem centered on Rakuten Points, and our massive volume of consumer behavior data,” Kobayashi highlights. “These are clear competitive advantages that allow us to provide a level of convenience and sustainable growth that other companies cannot easily replicate.”

Rakuten has been driving innovation in the AI space, launching the Rakuten AI agentic platform in July 2025 at the Rakuten AI Optimism event. Rakuten Ichiba’s new concierge is milestone in the transformation to an Agentic Ecosystem.

“The AI concierge leverages Rakuten AI, our advanced agentic AI tool designed to improve customer experiences within the Rakuten Ecosystem. It excels in Japanese language processing and generation, and features multimodal capabilities.”

Kobayashi recognizes that Rakuten isn’t the only major player in this relatively new field of chat-based commerce.

“We see this as a positive opportunity for technical innovation and for increasing the e-commerce penetration rate in Japan,” he says. “But we also recognize that there are currently no definitive success stories in the industry. Through our new concierge, we want to establish a new industry standard for AI-driven shopping.”

Driving the future of digital hospitality

“We view AI not just as a tool, but as a vital driver that deeply connects Rakuten’s unique, personality-rich shops with our users.”

The shift away from traditional search could also herald a change for Rakuten Ichiba’s 50,000+ merchants, as more customers embrace discovery shopping over purpose-driven shopping. On the back-end, merchants already have access to AI-driven shop management tools, which Kobayashi urges them to take full advantage of.

“Because the AI Concierge fundamentally changes the buying experience, it is more important than ever for merchants to enhance both the quality and quantity of their product information.”

Rakuten’s ultimate vision for AI-driven shopping is to move beyond the limitations of a typical software interface, and toward a service that captures the expertise and hospitality of a physical store representative who understands your history, preferences, and needs.

“I believe the user experience will evolve toward even higher levels of personalization and deeper understanding through human-like dialogue,” Kobayashi predicts. “Within the year, we aim to provide a shopping experience where the AI replicates the expertise and hospitality of our merchants, allowing customers to feel as if they are talking directly to a shop representative.”

“We want to use AI to continuously evolve the Rakuten Ichiba platform, accelerating the sustainable growth of our merchants while drastically improving the customer experience.”

*Comparison of normal search and Rakuten Ichiba AI Concierge during January 3 – 22, 2026.