• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Rakuten Group, a Japanese technology conglomerate with businesses primarily focused on ecommerce, fintech, digital content, and communications, has begun building an AI agentic network to integrate Rakuten AI into a wide range of its tools across the company.

AI chat, AI search with deep think, voice mode, translation, AI reading, coding, problem-solving and image creation are some of the tools the plan will support across affiliate advertising for publishers and consumers.

“When we say affiliate intelligence it’s us tripling down on a hard tech approach to solving the toughest problems in affiliate marketing,” Ben Cox, vice president of AI strategies and operations at Rakuten Advertising, said in a video interview. “We are born from Rakuten, so we are a technology company at the core. There’s no other affiliate network training and building LLMs from scratch.”

The rollout on Rakuten Ichiba, a shopping platform, is planned for fall 2025. The initial rollout integrated Rakuten AI into Rakuten Link, the communication app for Rakuten Mobile subscribers, and offers Rakuten AI as a web app in beta.

Rakuten AI integrates specialized agents and data insights including user attributes, preferences and purchasing trends to offer users personalized product recommendations.

Rakuten Group, best known in the U.S. for its cash-back, affiliate and advertising programs, created a suite of AI-powered tools for advertisers and marketers. Affiliate Intelligence is based around a full-funnel global network, AI, and data—the program spearheaded by Cox.  

Through the integration, consumers can input queries via text, voice-to-text conversion and image search, and choose from multiple AI-generated prompts for follow-up questions.

Rakuten Advertising Detect, released in late May, identifies ad fraud from usual performance patterns, as well as monitors financial products and competitive rankings such as spikes and dips across a variety of metrics. It is built into the company’s advertising services. Another model can identify advertising in context and determine whether something has gone wrong.

Rakuten, a division of Rakuten Group, is offered in the U.S. as a cash back program with discount codes for online and in-store purchases. It has a presence with more than 2,500 brands on its website.