avatarin, a company spun out of ANA Holdings, developed a 24/7 shopping assistant for Yamada Denki that uses OpenAI’s GPT‑Realtime to handle voice, text and visual inputs. The Kurashi-Marugoto AI Agent was created to extend in-store sales expertise into an always-on, multilingual retail interface.
Deployment and results
The agent ran in a two-week public campaign on Yamada Denki’s online store and engaged roughly 30,000 users, with 92% of post-use survey responses reported as positive. Conversations covered product discovery, trade-offs and purchase considerations, and each interaction ended with a short voice survey to collect feedback.
Design and technical approach
avatarin built the system to keep product information accurate without slowing the flow of conversation. The company used a retrieval-augmented generation approach to ground responses in product data while relying on GPT‑Realtime to maintain low-latency voice interactions.
Conversation design incorporated Yamada Denki’s sales expertise so the agent could gather differing information depending on product category and adapt when customers changed requirements or went off topic. The agent was also programmed to ask follow-up questions rather than only respond, aiming to guide product discovery rather than merely answer isolated queries.
OpenAI assisted with prompt structuring, cost optimization for an always-on voice service, and implementation best practices, according to avatarin. CEO Akira Fukabori said GPT‑Realtime’s multimodal performance allowed the technology “to adapt much more naturally to the way people communicate.” He also described the project as the start of an “interface revolution” in retail and expressed enthusiasm about the model’s capabilities.
Customer insights and company vision
avatarin reported that conversations revealed customer hesitations and decision drivers that were harder to surface through conventional online shopping. Customers reportedly described the agent as “easier to talk to than an actual sales associate” and valued the ability to ask questions after store hours without sales pressure.
avatarin has presented a vision of a single AI agent that carries customer context across web, phone and physical stores, summarized by the company slogan: “One Intelligence. One Brand. Every interface.” The public trial, conducted in July 2026, provided the reported engagement and satisfaction metrics and informed the companies’ next steps in retail AI deployment.
Original source: OpenAI News