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Rakuten Pairs Data with AI to Unlock Customer Insights and 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.