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Question: What is Rakuten AI (ai.rakuten.co.jp) and what does it offer?

Answer:

Rakuten AI — Overview

Rakuten AI (accessible at ai.rakuten.co.jp) is Rakuten Group’s flagship AI platform, fully launched in July 2025. It is a cutting-edge AI agent designed to enhance user experiences and streamline interactions across the Rakuten Ecosystem, as well as enrich and empower daily life.

Note: The service is only available in Japan. Users outside Japan are restricted from accessing it per the Terms of Service.

What is Rakuten AI?

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.

Rakuten Group’s mission is a company-wide effort called “AI-nization” — infusing AI into everything they do for customers, business partners, and employees. With more than 70 businesses worldwide serving 2 billion members, and insights gleaned from trillions of interactions over 25 years, they aim to build practical and valuable AI solutions accessible to everyone.

Key Features

Rakuten AI offers specialized AI skills, including:

In addition to research and shopping assistance, Rakuten AI is built to understand local context through deep Japanese language and cultural knowledge, aiming to deliver highly personalized, localized, and relevant support.

Users can conveniently input queries via text, voice-to-text conversion, and image search, and choose from multiple AI-generated prompts for follow-up questions.

Access & Availability

Rakuten AI is available to the public at ai.rakuten.co.jp and consolidates several of Rakuten’s AI offerings for an agentic experience that leverages Rakuten’s vast ecosystem.

Initially available via the Rakuten Link mobile app for Rakuten Mobile subscribers, Rakuten AI is also accessible through a standalone web app (beta) for anyone in Japan, free of charge.

The Technology Behind It — Rakuten AI 3.0

In December 2025, Rakuten unveiled Rakuten AI 3.0, its largest LLM to date — an approximately 700 billion parameter Mixture of Experts (MoE) model optimized for the Japanese language. It delivered up to 90% cost reduction in trials when powering Rakuten Ecosystem services, compared with third-party alternatives.

Rakuten AI also integrates OpenAI’s Realtime API with Rakuten’s homegrown LLM (Rakuten AI 7B) to provide seamless, natural conversations in both Japanese and English for voice-based customer support.

Business Solutions — Rakuten AI for Business

Rakuten AI for Business is a generative AI service targeting Japanese SMEs, boosting operational efficiency by reducing time and increasing accuracy in workflows. It handles business tasks such as translation, brainstorming, and analysis, and features customizable job-specific prompt templates and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) function that allows companies to upload their own files for AI analysis.

Vision: The Agentic Ecosystem

The long-term goal is to democratize AI. Rakuten envisions a future where Rakuten AI becomes the intelligent hub connecting all of the Rakuten Ecosystem services — going beyond answering questions to understanding user intent, drawing on trillions of interactions, and taking action.

All of this is guided by the Rakuten AI Code of Ethics, with cutting-edge technical safeguards and human oversight at every phase of design, development, and deployment to ensure Rakuten AI benefits everyone and all of society.

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