AI in Japan

Sony Bank and Fujitsu applied Anthropic's Claude on Amazon Bedrock, with Claude Code and MCP-connected agents, to the development of Sony Bank's production core banking system from September 2025. By July 2026 the development period from basic design to integration testing was 30% shorter and man-hours 40% lower, with humans keeping final judgement and quality assurance.

Bank of Kyoto, working with NTT Data, trained its own model in DataRobot on past suspicious transactions using transaction and customer data on its SIC data platform, and built a dashboard that puts the model's predictions and the data investigators need in one view. In validation from December 2025 it found cases earlier methods missed and cut follow-up work by about 30%.

Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony deployed an in-house RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) across Rakuten's nationwide 4G and 5G Open RAN network in Japan — one of the world's first nationwide commercial RIC deployments — with ML-powered rApps that predict subscriber traffic and dynamically adjust base station utilization, with a stated target of reducing network energy consumption by 15–20%.

At ENEOS Materials' Yokkaichi Plant, Yokogawa's FKDPP reinforcement-learning AI, trained on a plant simulator, controlled two valves of a butadiene distillation column for 35 days in early 2022 and, after a refined model in April 2022, became part of routine operations. It stabilised production, reduced operator workload and cut steam use by 40%.

Japan's avatarin built a 24/7 multilingual voice-AI retail agent on OpenAI GPT-Realtime and deployed it at Yamada Denki (one of Japan's largest electronics retailers). 30,000 shoppers engaged in the first two weeks, with 92% satisfaction.

Rakuten rebuilt its development workflows around Anthropic's Claude Code, cutting average time to market for new features from 24 working days to 5. One engineer had Claude Code implement a method in the 12.5M-line vLLM library in a seven-hour autonomous run with 99.9% numerical accuracy.

Tokyo-headquartered trading house Mitsubishi Corporation built its MC-GPT generative-AI platform on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and rolled it out to more than 1,000 monthly active users within two years, achieving 97% accuracy on contract and balance-certificate information extraction and 98% recall on withholding-slip filing decisions in a controlled accounting-automation experiment with PwC Tax Corporation.

OKI developed an AI-based inspection technology that reduces manual post-AOI visual checks of large, high-density printed circuit boards used in AI servers by about 80%. The system inspects four defect categories (solder wetting, misalignment, missing components, lifted parts) using a "good-product-only learning" method, and is rolling out to Marugoto EMS customer production lines from July 1, 2026. The technology is designed for high-mix electronics manufacturing handling tens of thousands of material types.