KARAKURI GeN Customer Support AI Agent

KARAKURI Inc. is a Tokyo company founded on 3 October 2016 that builds AI for contact centers and white-collar work. It has researched BERT since 2018 and GPT-style large language models since 2022, develops its own KARAKURI LM models and was selected for Japan's GENIAC program in 2024. Its products aim to automate inquiry handling and the back-office tasks that follow it.

GeN (Generative Navigator) is a customer-facing AI agent that clarifies vague questions through follow-up questions and answers only from the client's published content, including PDFs, to limit fabricated answers. It sits within the KARAKURI CXM platform alongside a voice agent for phone channels, a browser-operating back-office agent, the KARAKURI sensor guardrail layer, operator assist tools and a knowledge generator that builds FAQs from support logs. A Gov Edition serves local governments over websites and LINE. Users include Sakura Internet, Ikyu, Mitsui Direct General Insurance, Shizuoka City and Tochigi Prefecture.

• Clarifying dialogue: GeN asks follow-up questions to pin down intent before pointing to the right answer or page.
• Grounded answers: responses draw only on the client's published content, including PDFs, to limit hallucination.
• Voice agent: KARAKURI voice agent handles phone inquiries with speech recognition and post-call processing.
• Back-office agent: operates a browser to complete tasks that follow an inquiry, such as order changes.
• Guardrails: KARAKURI sensor adds anomaly detection, personal data protection, compliance monitoring and human review.
• Knowledge generation: KARAKURI Knowledge Generator builds FAQs and knowledge from support logs.

Japanese-owned retailers, insurers and service firms in Vietnam could pilot GeN for Japanese-language customer channels and internal helpdesks. E-commerce sellers can combine the chat agent with the back-office agent to process order changes automatically. Local authorities could use the Gov Edition model on websites and messaging apps for routine citizen questions such as waste collection or subsidies.

KARAKURI reports about 80% self-resolution with GeN at Sakura Internet and an average self-resolution improvement of about 1.6x across client companies. Mitsui Direct General Insurance reports that the voice agent resolved 52.7% of after-hours calls without a human agent, with zero complaints in its first two months. An outcome-based plan links fees to results, and the AgenticCS BPO option is positioned at less than half the cost of traditional BPO.

Contact centers are shifting from scripted chatbots to AI agents that resolve inquiries end to end across chat, phone and back-office systems, and vendors are starting to price on outcomes. Labor shortages in customer support affect Japan and increasingly Southeast Asia, while public agencies seek round-the-clock citizen service without adding staff.

KARAKURI Inc. was founded on 3 October 2016 and is based at Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, with capital of 100 million yen; CEO Shimon Oda. Recognition includes an ICC Summit award (2018), Google for Startups programs (2020, 2022), AWS LLM development support (2023) and selection for METI's GENIAC program (2024). It announced a strategic partnership with Helpfeel and works on physical AI with Highlanders.