How avatarin built a 24/7 retail agent with GPT‑Realtime

Japan’s home-appliance retailers face a persistent challenge: extending expert sales support beyond store hours while staffing remains tight. 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.

Built on OpenAI’s GPT‑Realtime, the Kurashi-Marugoto AI Agent supports natural voice conversations and guides shoppers from product discovery to purchase decisions. In a two-week public campaign on Yamada Denki’s online store, approximately 30,000 people used the agent; 92% of survey responses were positive.

avatarin had worked with OpenAI well before the Yamada Denki project, using the OpenAI API for speech recognition, inquiry analysis, and employee training. Those earlier efforts helped the team understand what it takes to apply AI in practice. The shopping agent was its first major opportunity to bring those lessons directly to customers.

For Fukabori, one of the key advantages of GPT‑Realtime was the ability to bring voice, text, and visual understanding together within a single conversational experience.

“For us, the performance of a single model went beyond what we had seen from specialized speech recognition systems. It can work across speech, text, and images with low latency. That is why we chose GPT‑Realtime. Instead of asking people to adapt to the rules of a machine, the technology can adapt much more naturally to the way people communicate.”

A conventional chatbot waits for the right keyword. avatarin’s agent listens for context instead. It can respond to a shopper’s uncertainty, changing preferences, and the details that turn a generic answer into a useful recommendation.

Fukabori describes the difference with an everyday shopping problem.

“Customers do not want a chatbot. They want intelligence. ‘I need a refrigerator for a family of four, but my kitchen is small. Which one should I choose?’ Real customer service means being able to answer that question.”

avatarin designed the agent around three essential qualities:

• Keeping product information accurate without slowing the conversation.A retrieval-augmented generation system grounds the agent’s responses in product information, while GPT‑Realtime keeps the interaction responsive. This allows shoppers to have a fluid voice conversation while still receiving information based on relevant product data.
• Translating Yamada Denki’s sales expertise into conversation design.The information a sales associate needs to gather varies significantly by product category. avatarin incorporated Yamada Denki’s customer service knowledge into the agent’s conversation flows and prompting. The system is designed to adapt when customers change their requirements or move temporarily off topic, while guardrails help keep the conversation focused on the shopping experience.
• Designing an agent that asks, rather than only answers.Many traditional chatbot experiences wait for the customer to provide the next instruction. avatarin took a more proactive approach. The agent asks follow-up questions to uncover the customer’s actual needs, helping move the conversation from a simple question-and-answer exchange toward guided product discovery.

OpenAI worked with avatarin to structure complex prompts, optimize API costs for always-on voice service, and share implementation best practices. That support helped avatarin focus on translating Yamada Denki’s service model into an experience that felt accurate, responsive, and distinctly on-brand.

“I’m excited by how naturally it understands our intentions,” Fukabori says, “and by glimpses of intelligence that sometimes go beyond what people can do.”

The public campaign made the impact visible in just two weeks:

• Approximately 30,000 users
• 24/7 multilingual support by voice and text
• 92% positive survey responses

The most important discovery was not the scale alone. Every conversation revealed what shoppers cared about, why they hesitated, and what might help them decide. “With conventional online shopping, those insights were difficult to see,” Fukabori explains. “With an AI agent, they become part of the conversation.”

The service also opened new moments for retail. Customers could ask questions after stores closed and speak candidly about budgets or uncertainty without feeling sales pressure.

Each conversation ended with a short voice survey, making feedback a natural continuation of the shopping experience.

Customers described the agent as “easier to talk to than an actual sales associate” and appreciated being able to ask questions again without feeling stressed.

For avatarin, the implication reaches beyond the sale. A better conversation can also reveal how to improve service, marketing, and the next customer experience.

avatarin envisions a world where a single AI agent serves customers seamlessly across the web, phone, and physical stores. Instead of separate systems for each channel, the same intelligence carries the customer’s context forward. The result is continuity: one customer, one conversation, and one brand, wherever the interaction takes place.

For Yamada Holdings, whose businesses span home appliances, housing, financial services, and more, that vision could make AI a trusted companion across everyday life. The ambition is not just to connect channels, but to create AI that embodies the company’s brand and spirit of hospitality.

OpenAI’s technology is helping accelerate that vision. “AI has clearly shifted into a higher gear,” Fukabori says. “I can’t wait to see what we can build with this extraordinary intelligence.”

But avatarin does not want every company to sound the same. “We want people to experience one intelligence that embodies each company’s identity and brand across every interface. That is what we mean by ‘One Intelligence. One Brand. Every interface.’ The era of single purpose AI is over. I believe OpenAI will lead the next era of general purpose, multimodal intelligence.”