Pairing data with APIs to unlock customer value

The Rakuten Group has more than 1.8 billion members from around the world interacting with its ecosystem of over 70 online services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content, and communications. Rakuten also operates as a B2B company in numerous ways, including helping more than 57,000 Japanese merchants sell online to Japanese customers; providing e-commerce and advertising solutions to large enterprises in international markets; and building and operating mobile networks.

As Rakuten seeks to provide ever-increasing value to its customers, it’s hard to overstate the importance of data. This includes the vast amounts of transactional and behavioral data from Rakuten’s ecosystem of services, down to internal business data preserved in PDFs or Word documents. “For us, the data asset is

the key corporate asset,” said Yusuke Kaji, General Manager of AI for Business at Rakuten Group, Inc. 

With AI, Rakuten is finding innovative ways to leverage this asset: “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 said. In partnership with OpenAI, Tokyo-headquartered Rakuten is setting a standard for how companies around the world can approach generative AI initiatives with security and privacy at the forefront. 

Rakuten was quick to get started with OpenAI’s API: They began building with GPT‑3.5, and even created their own internal chatbot for employees before the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise.

Rakuten’s goal is to become an “AI empowerment company.” They’re using Code Interpreter and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) with OpenAI’s models to understand and extract value from complex, unstructured data, and the results have empowered customers and businesses in new ways: 

Generative AI is an emerging field, and Japan is also exploring policy questions. Any incidents involving a large company could possibly have a chilling effect on innovation for many years to come. “In Japan, trust is extremely important,” Kaji said. “If lost, it will take a very long time to rebuild that trust.”