Ting Cai, AI leaders unveil Rakuten’s agentic future: Rakuten Technology Conference 2025
“Our future at Rakuten isn’t just about innovation – it’s about intelligent collaboration,” declared Ting Cai, Rakuten’s Chief AI & Data Officer at Rakuten Technology Conference 2025. “We embrace a hybrid approach: partner with the best, build the best, to forge our agentic future.”
Over the past year, the company has launched over 50 groundbreaking AI products and services, driving impact across the entire ecosystem from internal operations and customer experiences to unlocking further growth for its merchant and business partners.
On November 15th, Cai highlighted these innovations as he took the stage at the Tokyo Headquarters.
While partnerships are a strong accelerant to Rakuten’s AI strategy – from reducing time-to-market for its software developers with Anthropic’s Claude Code, to collaborating with OpenAI to deploy advanced AI voice agents in Rakuten Mobile’s customer service – the company has also been steadfast in developing its own innovative AI technologies and positioning itself to become Japan’s leading AI company.
In July 2025, Rakuten launched Rakuten AI, its agentic AI platform, and has since deployed various agents across its diverse business ecosystem, including Rakuten Link, Rakuten Ichiba and Rakuten Travel, with more expansion plans underway.
Throughout his illuminating keynote, Cai welcomed several AI product experts to the stage for practical demonstrations of the company’s latest AI innovations.
Rakuten Mobile elevates customer service with agentic AI
Rakuten Mobile – which surpassed 9.5 million subscriptions as of November 7, 2025 – has also introduced advanced AI technology to significantly enhance its customer experience.
“One of Rakuten’s earliest and most successful forays into agentic AI was the development of Rakuten Mobile AI Assistant, now in its second iteration, version 2.0,” explains Cai.
The AI Assistant was designed to bridge the gap between online and in-store shopping. Previously, in-store customers often missed out on special offers or device options, while online shoppers lacked the personalized guidance typically provided by store staff.
Duc Thuan Ngo, Manager of Conversational Experiences, came onstage to walk through how AI customer service leverages voice chat and an intuitive natural language interface to enable seamless navigation. The onstage demo illustrated how a typical user can go through all three stages of the customer shopping journey – consideration, onboarding and customer support – via the platform’s voice and text chat interface.
Introducing Rakuten AI for Desktop
Days before Rakuten Technology Conference, Rakuten announced a major milestone in personal computing and artificial intelligence. In collaboration with HP Japan, the company unveiled Rakuten AI for Desktop an on-device intelligent AI platform that allows users to access Rakuten agents both online and offline for the first time.
The platform, which will be available pre-bundled on HP’s consumer and commercial devices in Japan from Spring to Summer 2026, enables Rakuten’s large language model to run directly on the device, ensuring seamless transition between cloud and local device.
Raju Vasanth, Head of AI Product at Rakuten, took to the stage to demo the various ways the platform might help him prepare for a business trip to Tokyo: from finding a hotel via Rakuten Travel, to allowing him to summarize emails and create a report on the plane in on-device mode, to finally writing and translating a presentation once on the ground at his destination.
“Rakuten AI for Desktop offers enhanced privacy by running tasks directly on local devices,” stated Vasanth. “This is truly intelligence that goes with you everywhere, providing a powerful solution to manage sensitive and confidential data and eliminating concerns about relying on browser-based generative AI platforms.”
Creating a seamless shopping journey on Rakuten Ichiba with AI
Rakuten Ichiba has also soft launched an AI-powered shopping assistant within its mobile app, offering select users a more personalized and intuitive shopping experience. Emily Zhao, Vice Senior Manager of Search Product, came onstage to show how the shopping agent can take an initial vague query, narrow down choices and ultimately find the perfect birthday present for her young son. Rakuten AI on Ichiba mobile app analyzes user intent, researches relevant details, identifies key factors, and supports product comparisons to simplify decision-making.
The leading e-commerce platform plans to roll out the feature to all users by year-end, enhancing the shopping experience for millions across Japan.
Driving Japan and Rakuten’s agentic future
“Looking forward, we envision a future where agents are everywhere throughout the Rakuten Ecosystem,” said Cai. “These agents will not only make everyday life more productive and simplify access to Rakuten group services – from shopping, fintech to mobile – but also act as proactive assistants that enhance every aspect of users’ lives.”
Earlier this year, Rakuten was selected by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) to participate in the Generative AI Accelerator Challenge (GENIAC) project to advance Japan’s generative AI capabilities.
Under GENIAC, Rakuten continues to invest in research and development of a cutting-edge, open-weight AI foundation model designed to significantly expand memory capabilities.
As Rakuten continues to chart Japan’s agentic future, its next chapter centers on deepening the human-AI relationship with hyper-personalization and user memory. These advancements will enable intelligent agents to go beyond simple interactions by anticipating needs, remembering preferences and acting proactively, delivering seamless experiences across the entire Rakuten Ecosystem.
