In a two-week public campaign on Yamada Denki's online store, approximately 30,000 people used the Kurashi-Marugoto AI Agent, and 92% of survey responses were positive. avatarin, an AI customer service company spun out of ANA Holdings, partnered with Yamada Holdings to turn experienced associates' knowledge into a 24/7 multilingual shopping agent. The agent is built on OpenAI's GPT-Realtime, supports natural voice conversations, and guides shoppers from product discovery to purchase decisions.
Akira Fukabori, CEO of avatarin, said: "This is not an extension of the conventional chatbot. It is an attempt to expand what customer service can be with AI. We see it as the beginning of an 'interface revolution' in retail."
Japan's home-appliance retailers face a persistent challenge: extending expert sales support beyond store hours while staffing remains tight. avatarin had worked with OpenAI well before this project, using the OpenAI API for speech recognition, inquiry analysis and employee training, and the shopping agent was its first major opportunity to bring those lessons directly to customers. Fukabori said one key advantage of GPT-Realtime was bringing voice, text and visual understanding together in a single conversational experience.
A retrieval-augmented generation system grounds the agent's responses in product information, while GPT-Realtime keeps the interaction responsive. avatarin incorporated Yamada Denki's customer service knowledge into the agent's conversation flows and prompting, because the information a sales associate needs to gather varies by product category. The system is designed to adapt when customers change their requirements or move temporarily off topic, and guardrails help keep the conversation focused on the shopping experience. The agent also asks follow-up questions to uncover the customer's actual needs. OpenAI worked with avatarin to structure complex prompts and optimize API costs for always-on voice service.
The campaign offered 24/7 multilingual support by voice and text. Each conversation ended with a short voice survey, and customers described the agent as "easier to talk to than an actual sales associate." avatarin envisions a single AI agent serving customers across the web, phone and physical stores, carrying the customer's context forward.
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