• The new AI chat support service for its customers in Japan is a significant update to Rakuten Mobile’s Link App
• It is the first step towards a ‘personal concierge’ AI service
• Rakuten AI is already used daily by more than 8,000 of the company’s employees

Rakuten Mobile has announced an upgraded Rakuten Link app for its Saikyo Plan subscribers in Japan. The enhanced app includes the Rakuten Link AI service, which the operator describes as an AI chat service that supports users “as a consultation and ideation partner”.

Through the integration of existing support app services, customers will now be able to check their monthly fees and data usage through the AI Chat interface. For those in a chatty mood, they can go beyond accessing information on Rakuten Mobile’s offerings and can ask a range of general interest questions. Hey, it’s a chatbot.

The service was launched at a press conference in Japan earlier today (Thursday), alongside a business update from Mickey Mikitani, representative director and chairman of Rakuten Mobile. 

Between February and September this year, Rakuten Mobile’s market share expanded with main line usage up 1.6% (along with a corresponding decline from rivals NTT Docomo, au and Softbank), said Mikitani, adding that the telco has now surpassed 8 million subscribers (as of 18 October) and still aims to be the “number-one carrier” in Japan.

It has a long way to go: According to recent GSMA Intelligence data, NTT Docomo currently holds a 40% market share with about 71 million reported subscribers, while KDDI-owned au has 66 million, and SoftBank follows with 44 million. This gives Rakuten Mobile an estimated market share of just over 4%.

Introducing the Link AI service, Mikitani said that the democratisation of AI was central to the company’s mission, enabling everyone to utilise AI easily and freely. The way to do this is through generative AI, rather than specialist AI limited to specific areas, he explained. Its hope is for the service to become “a powerful partner for daily life” – an ambition that is widely shared by others in the AI ecosystem. So far, the service leans heavily into the “chat assistant/conversational” approach, with no explicit mention of agentic AI – which is likely to become a dominant interface for the next wave of AI services. Also, the Link AI service is only launching on Android devices, with iOS support at a later date.

So how does Rakuten’s service differ from other GenAI services? The company says that being integrated into the existing user interface eliminates the need for users to download a new app, create a new account, learn new commands and pay additional subscription fees. As the service develops, Rakuten envisages it becoming users’ “own personal concierge”, which is perhaps the nearest it comes to promising an AI Agent approach.

Of course, Rakuten is far more than just a mobile operator, and the underlying Rakuten AI service is supporting all of its myriad of businesses. The company says it has over 70 separate data services across its business portfolio, with 41.5 million monthly active users. It has more than 100 million users (or “members”) in Japan alone, and 900,000 business partners. That’s a healthy amount of data points, and it intends to use AI to drive 20% growth through marketing, operational and customer efficiency gains. It says that already, over 8,000 of its employees use Rakuten AI on a daily basis.

Ting Cai, chief AI and data officer for Rakuten Group, gave some additional insight into the Rakuten AI strategy. He described how the company wants to create value through three distinct waves. The first, “deep learning at scale”, is focused on building better search, recommendation and advertising experiences across the Rakuten ecosystem. The second wave is “Rakuten AI for Business”, which it describes as empowering merchants, hotels and other businesses to drive profitability and better connect with their customers. The third wave is “Rakuten AI for Consumers” and is a reinforcement of the trustworthy and useful AI approach promoted by the company, being accessible to everyone.

Just a few weeks ago, Ting Cai outlined the company’s latest developments in AI and shared his vision for the future of the technology, saying: “We want to leverage AI to deliver the ultimate hospitality to our customers. Not only to meet their needs, but to anticipate what they want.” The idea of an AI-powered concierge multimodal service was first mentioned at this event and referenced as an experimental feature that was under development, to be rolled out to select Rakuten services in the near future.

Agentic AI has recently been identified by Gartner as one of the top tech trends for 2025. The term basically means AI with the added permission to go and find things and interact with other services. In other words, being capable of autonomous action, decision-making and goal-oriented behaviour that requires minimal or no human intervention. Gartner predicts that within four years, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI.

- Guy Daniels, Director of Content, TelecomTV