Rakuten Leverages AI and Data to Unlock Customer Insights and Drive Value
The significance of data to Rakuten’s mission of delivering exceptional value to customers cannot be overstated. This includes vast amounts of transactional and behavioral data from its diverse services, as well as internal business data stored in formats like PDFs and Word documents. “For us, the data asset is the key corporate asset,” stated Yusuke Kaji, General Manager of AI for Business at Rakuten Group, Inc.
Rakuten is harnessing the power of AI to innovate with these data assets. “We believe AI models, such as those developed by OpenAI, are the way to amplify the impact we can make on top of the data,” Kaji explained. By partnering with OpenAI, Rakuten, headquartered in Tokyo, is pioneering a secure and privacy-conscious approach to generative AI initiatives, setting a global standard for other companies to follow.
Leveraging Data for Enhanced Customer Service, Shopping UX, and B2B Consulting
Rakuten swiftly adopted OpenAI's API, beginning with GPT-3.5 and even developing an internal chatbot for employees prior to the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise.
As an "AI empowerment company," Rakuten aims to harness AI to unlock value from complex, unstructured data. Utilizing OpenAI's Code Interpreter and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) models, Rakuten has revolutionized customer and business interactions:
Improved Customer Service Efficiency: Previously, customers experienced lengthy wait times for service ticket responses. By integrating OpenAI’s API with RAG on their internal knowledge base, Rakuten can now automatically respond to and assist users, significantly enhancing response times and efficiency.
Enhanced Shopping Experience: With limited time to sift through numerous user reviews, Rakuten is developing a feature that extracts key topics and summarizes reviews, providing users with structured, accessible information for an improved shopping experience.
B2B Consulting and Insights: Knowledge retrieval has also transformed Rakuten's B2B services. Rakuten consultants now offer merchants and enterprises actionable insights from the company’s vast data resources, including market analyses and sales trends, empowering businesses with valuable information.
By leveraging AI and data, Rakuten continues to drive innovation and deliver exceptional value to customers and businesses alike.
Prioritizing Privacy and Security: Rakuten's Partnership with OpenAI
Generative AI is a rapidly evolving field, and Japan is actively engaging with the associated policy questions. Any incident involving a major corporation could potentially stifle innovation for many years. “In Japan, trust is paramount,” Kaji explained. “Once lost, it takes a very long time to restore.”
This is why Rakuten deemed it essential to partner with a company that prioritizes security. After extensive evaluations and a rigorous due diligence process, they selected OpenAI as their collaborator.
Rakuten is committed to innovating with models and data, with privacy and security as their top priorities. “In every endeavor, we ensure the highest standards of guardrails are in place to protect our users and clients,” Kaji emphasized.
Embracing AI Empowerment with OpenAI: Rakuten's Journey
Rakuten is leveraging OpenAI's API to harness the power of real-time voice and vision capabilities. These advancements enable them to generate meeting action items, email communications, and multilingual translations from internal meeting data that exists solely in audio format. This integration also paves the way for more conversational AI experiences within their ecosystem. The core of this transformation is data: these AI-driven interactions provide richer insights into user needs, leading to enhanced products.
“Clicks and impressions are merely proxies for user preferences. By integrating LLMs into the user experience, we can directly understand users' pain points and preferences through conversational inputs,” said Kaji. “Capturing and managing this new type of data allows us to offer better services.”
Rakuten's mission is to empower people and society, and in 2024, they view AI as indispensable in achieving this goal. At Rakuten, AI brings a new level of empowerment, particularly in helping small businesses compete in the digital arena. “As a global innovation leader, we felt it was our responsibility to embrace AI with the aim of creating a better, more optimistic future. OpenAI has been an ideal partner in this endeavor,” added Kaji.
This approach not only underscores Rakuten's commitment to innovation but also highlights how AI can drive meaningful improvements across various facets of their operations. By integrating cutting-edge AI technology, Rakuten is poised to set new standards in user experience and service excellence.
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