https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVvtxEIkpNO/
 

1 day ago

Rakuten TV Enterprise has announced the launch of LIVE, a European event series that will bring together senior leaders from across the connected TV and streaming industry.
The first event, taking place on March 17 in Madrid, will convene more than 150 senior executives and decision-makers from across the ecosystem, including advertisers, media agencies, platforms, production companies, studios and broadcasters for an evening of keynotes and networking.
LIVE Madrid will feature an opening address by Cédric Dufour, CEO and president of Rakuten TV, who will discuss the evolution of the European CTV market and the role of technological innovation in the growth of streaming.

“Connected TV is entering a new phase of maturity in Europe, as streaming models evolve and advertising becomes an increasingly central driver of growth,” said Cédric Dufour, CEO and president of Rakuten TV. “With LIVE, we want to create a space where the industry can come together to exchange perspectives, anticipate change and build stronger collaboration across the ecosystem. Europe is a diverse and dynamic market and dialogue between platforms, advertisers, media companies and technology partners is essential to unlocking the full potential of CTV. We look forward to welcoming industry leaders from across Europe for this series of events.”

https://worldscreen.com/rakuten-tv-introduces-live-event-series/
 

Banijay Kids And Family Partners With Rakuten TV For New Content Deal

Banijay Kids & Family, a leader in children’s entertainment known for hits like Totally Spies! and Mr Bean: The Animated Series, has announced a new partnership with Rakuten TV. This collaboration will bring several beloved titles to audiences across Europe.

As part of the agreement, Rakuten TV will license multiple seasons of LoliRock and Totally Spies! to enhance the availability of Banijay Kids & Family’s iconic intellectual properties in key markets.
The deal includes the first two seasons of LoliRock for viewers in the UK, Ireland, Spain, and Italy. Additionally, the first two seasons of Totally Spies! will be accessible in the UK, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, while seasons three and four will be available to audiences in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Dan Lewsey, Global Head of Digital at Banijay Kids & Family, commented, “Our portfolio is filled with popular and enduring brands, and this partnership with Rakuten TV highlights their strength and global resonance. Our strategy focuses on nurturing audiences across various platforms, helping us broaden their presence and deliver top-tier content to viewers worldwide, ensuring fans can engage with these stories wherever they may be.”

Marcos Milanez, Chief Content Officer at Rakuten TV, added, “This partnership with Banijay Kids & Family allows us to offer iconic titles on Rakuten TV’s FAST channels, providing high-quality family entertainment for free throughout Europe. Together, we’re raising the bar for what audiences can expect from premium family content at no cost.”

https://news.broadcastmediaafrica.com/2026/01/28/...new-content-deal/
 

FAST viewership rises 21% in Q4 2025 amid continued growth in ad-supported streaming

March 13, 2026

Amagi reported that global free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) viewership increased 21% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025, while ad impressions rose 27%, according to its March 2026 “Airtime Report: Special Edition – AI in Media Operations.”

“The industry is entering a phase where AI is no longer just about experimentation — it’s about embedding intelligence directly into operational workflows,” said Srinivasan KA, co-founder and president of global business at Amagi. “Media companies that integrate applied AI across ingest, localization, scheduling and monetization will unlock meaningful gains in speed, efficiency and scalability.”

Regionally, FAST viewing growth remained strong across all major markets in the fourth quarter compared with the same period in 2024.

Latin America recorded 66% growth in hours of viewing and 77% growth in ad impressions. Asia-Pacific posted 23% growth in viewing hours and 43% growth in ad impressions, while Europe, the Middle East and Africa saw 22% viewing growth and a 43% increase in ad impressions.

The United States and Canada posted 17% growth in viewing hours and 22% growth in ad impressions and continued to account for the largest share of global FAST viewing.

Entertainment and news remained the leading FAST channel genres globally. Channels launched after December 2024 generated 18% of global viewing hours and 16% of global ad impressions during the quarter, according to the report.

Amagi said the findings suggest applied AI could represent the next major operational shift for media companies as streaming distribution continues to mature.

https://www.newscaststudio.com/2026/03/13/...-ad-supported-streaming/


 

Im März 2026 steht Rakuten Ichiba im Zeichen des ersten großen „Rakuten Super Sale“ des Jahres, der umfassende Rabatte, Bonuspunkte und kostenlosen Versand bietet. Parallel findet vom 16. bis 21. März 2026 die Rakuten Fashion Week TOKYO AW statt, die Herbst-/Winterkollektionen präsentiert. Zudem intensiviert Rakuten die Integration von KI im Einkaufserlebnis.

Wichtige Ereignisse und Trends im März 2026:

Rakuten Super Sale: Als Japans größte vierteljährliche Shopping-Veranstaltung bietet dieser Sale in der Regel in der ersten Märzhälfte hohe Rabatte auf verschiedenste Produktkategorien.

Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo A/W 2026: Vom 16. bis 21. März 2026 findet die Hauptveranstaltung in Shibuya Hikarie statt. Sie konzentriert sich auf physische Laufstegschauen, um die Textur und das direkte Engagement zu betonen.

Integration von KI und Shopping: Rakuten Ichiba kooperiert verstärkt mit Google, um nahtlose Einkaufserlebnisse über YouTube zu ermöglichen.

Mobile & Service-Kampagnen: Rakuten Mobile startet Kampagnen zum Frühlingsbeginn, die verstärkt auf 5G-Konnektivität und iPhone-Angebote setzen.

Shopping-Strategien: Experten empfehlen die Nutzung der „0/5“-Tage (Tage, die auf 0 oder 5 enden) und Shopping-Marathons, um Punkte zu maximieren.

https://www.google.com/...NKgCALACAQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
 

Non-GAAP operating income of 199.9 billion yen = $ 1.25 billion

The FinTech segment achieved revenue of 975.9 billion yen in FY2025, up 19.0% YoY, and Non-GAAP operating income of 199.9 billion yen, up 30.3% YoY, achieving growth in both revenue and profit. Growth was driven by customer base and transaction volume expansion with increased revenue across all businesses.

https://global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2026/0212_01.html
 

In addition to revenue growth, significant improvements in Rakuten Mobile's profitability contributed to consolidated Non-GAAP operating income of 106.3 billion yen for FY2025, an improvement of 99.2 billion yen YoY. The Group achieved a record high EBITDA*1 for FY2025 of 435.9 billion yen, up 33.7% YoY.

https://www.google.com/...oECCkQAQ&biw=1440&bih=773&dpr=1
 

Rakuten showcases Intelligent Growth vision at MWC Barcelona 2026

3 days ago

Open network architecture, diversifying revenue and adapting to an AI-driven era – those were just some of the hot telecom topics Rakuten spotlighted earlier this month at MWC Barcelona 2026, the world’s largest connectivity event.

Exhibiting under the theme ‘Intelligent Growth,’ Rakuten conveyed how telcos can scale networks as software, embrace AI-powered solutions, and reimagine how networks are operated and monetized, delivering diversified value beyond connectivity.

Through high-level discussions with partners and news announcements spanning world-first certifications, evolving customer relationships and industry-changing validations, Rakuten showcased the ways its telecom journey continues to go from strength to strength.

Mikitani presented Rakuten’s unique blueprint for unlocking new revenue growth and customer value at the main stage at MWC 2026.

Rakuten Group Chairman and CEO Mickey Mikitani took to the main stage to share how telecom operators and their partners can create new digital ecosystems through their existing strengths and assets. Mikitani presented Rakuten’s unique blueprint for unlocking new revenue growth and customer value. “I really believe that it’s time for the telecom industry to change from just providing network connectivity to providing more enriched consumer services. If you can convert your telecom service, through a reward program into a very enriched ecosystem, it is going to be very positive for your business.” Mikitani said.

A selection of other Rakuten leaders also graced the event’s GSMA stage, including Rakuten Mobile Chief Data and AI Officer Sachin Verma; Rakuten Symphony’s SVP of Global Service Delivery Subha Shrinivasan; SVP of Solution Architecture Devesh Gautam; and Nagendra Bykampadi, Global Head of Product Security. They covered topics including digital twins, energy and tower efficiency, and the future of 5G.

Throughout the event, a variety of Rakuten customers, partners and other industry leaders shared their expertise at the Rakuten booth theater. 1&1 Mobilfunk CEO Michael Martin joined Rakuten Mobile co-CEO and Rakuten Symphony President Sharad Sriwastawa in a panel moderated by Head of GSMA Intelligence Peter Jarich to discuss the future of Open RAN, and its potential to set the standard for the next generation of mobile networks. “Operators are deploying multiple technologies, but ARPU (average revenue per user) is not increasing. There’s a big need to reduce cost and also increase revenue. Not necessarily through connectivity, but other techniques,” shared Sriwastawa. He then emphasized six structural shifts critical to reshaping the industry, including: sustainable telcos, AI-led automatous operations, non-terrestrial networks, telcos powering ecosystem & monetization, software defined networks and future-proof, secure & 6G ready networks.

Rakuten International leaders joined a panel discussion to reflect on how elements of Rakuten’s ecosystem model have been successfully replicated in markets across the globe. Amit Patel, CEO, Rakuten International and Rakuten Rewards; Cédric Dufour, CEO of Rakuten TV and President of Rakuten France; and Puneet Handa, Chief Strategy Officer, Rakuten Symphony shared their takes on the value that customers see in the Rakuten model. “Every service has been strategically added to leverage the concept of identity across these different services so that consumers actually feel a compelling reason to use Rakuten. That’s very unique; I don’t think there’s another company in the world that integrates this many different experiences across such a wide range of categories,”  said Patel.

Rakuten Mobile has staked its claim as a leading global operator when it comes to AI use and has already achieved 20% RAN energy savings, AI-driven retail location intelligence, quality assurance and root cause analysis, ensuring consistent experience and quality to its users. Rakuten Mobile leaders including Sachin Verma, Chief AI and Data Officer, Mahmoud ElSakhawy, Vice Director, Mobile Network Supervisory and Brijesh Yadav, Vice President, Engineering, Mobile Networks and Tech Strategy, discussed how Rakuten Mobile is enabling autonomous networks and sustainable connectivity through AI.

Rakuten in the news at MWC

Rakuten made a number of key announcements throughout MWC Barcelona 2026 – following news made prior to the event that Rakuten Mobile had become the world’s first MNO to achieve TM Forum’s Level 4 RAN Energy Efficiency certification, as well as Rakuten Mobile’s completion of a nationwide deployment of RIC applications across its commercial mobile network in Japan.

Rakuten becomes Google Cloud OEM

Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage is now built into Google Distributed Cloud Connected Servers, making Rakuten’s software-defined storage a standard, pre-integrated component of Google Distributed Cloud Connected Server deployment. Through this OEM agreement, Google Cloud will include Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage in Google Distributed Cloud Connected Server deployment, enabling customers to purchase a fully integrated compute and storage stack that is pre-validated, supported and delivered by Google Cloud. Google Distributed Cloud customers can now benefit from pre-validated and pre-integrated Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage, eliminating complex design and deployment cycles. Enterprises can now purchase the entire distributed cloud stack as a single bundle from Google Cloud.

Rakuten Symphony partners with Beeline Uzbekistan

Rakuten Symphony, VEON and Beeline Uzbekistan, signed a MoU to explore collaboration on Open RAN development, AI-powered network intelligence and next-generation digital platforms.
In Barcelona, Rakuten Symphony and VEON and Beeline Uzbekistan, VEON’s digital operator, signed an MoU to explore collaboration on Open RAN development, AI-powered network intelligence and next-generation digital platforms. The MoU establishes a framework for the companies to explore cloud solutions, global IoT and mobile workforce connectivity and eSIM and international roaming. The announcement builds on the Rakuten-VEON partnership initially launched in 2023, which has seen Rakuten partner with Kyivstar and Beeline Kazakhstan in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Rakuten Cloud announces Samsung, Nokia validations

Rakuten Symphony announced the successful interoperability testing of Samsung’s cloud-native virtualized RAN (vRAN) and virtualized Core (vCore) running on the Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform. The validation shows that Samsung’s vRAN and vCore software stacks operate seamlessly on the Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform with near-perfect interoperability results, achieved with zero code changes on either side.

The collaboration demonstrates that operators can deploy best-in-class, multi-vendor cloud-native network functions quickly and confidently, without lengthy integration cycles or custom engineering. The milestone enables telecom service providers to combine Samsung’s vRAN and vCore solutions with Rakuten Cloud’s cloud-native platform to build flexible, scalable and future-ready networks.
Rakuten Mobile, Rakuten Symphony, and Nokia announced that Nokia’s cloud-native network functions, including IP Multimedia Subsystem for voice services, Subscriber Data Management, Cloud Signaling Director, Mediation and NetGuard Certificate Manager, are now deployed and running in live commercial operations at Rakuten Mobile on Rakuten Cloud. The milestone confirms Nokia’s cloud-native IMS Core network services operating seamlessly alongside other cloud-native network functions on Rakuten Cloud in a production environment, reinforcing Rakuten Cloud’s growing ecosystem of partner solutions designed for large-scale, sustainable 5G networks.

Not a traditional telecom player

Throughout the three days, Rakuten showcased its disruptive ecosystem leadership, unmatched network efficiency and AI-powered global telecom leadership – all of which are enabling a vision of intelligent telecom growth. Rakuten entered the industry to disrupt the status quo, reimagining how networks can be operated and monetized, and is now supporting a new era of transformation – in an AI-first world where connectivity turns operators into ecosystem enablers with diversified revenue streams.

https://rakuten.today/blog/...rowth-vision-at-mwc-barcelona-2026.html
 

https://lp.viber.com/Modern_Dating  

https://boudreaucapital.substack.com/p/...en-full-year-2025-the-capex
 

The big advantage of AST Space Mobile:

AST SpaceMobile’s upcoming cellular service is designed to work indoors and inside vehicles, connecting directly to unmodified smartphones using low-band frequencies that can penetrate buildings and foliage.

https://www.google.com/...NKgCALACAQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
 

Now let’s move to the key risk of the business which is the debt load that the company has. For the debt to non fintech EBITDA for 2025 ended at 6.5 times versus 11.4 times in 2024. The main thing is the improvement in EBITDA in the mobile division that turned positive in 2025. For the upcoming year in 2026 they plan to be at 6.0 times and 2027 at 5.0 times which will derisk the main issue for most investors. It will also lead to better interest rates due to the rating agency which will improve cash flow generation.

There is a little bit of a twist with the debt since Rakuten got an 8% ish stake in ASTS with a value of $2.91 billion at a current share price of $93. They use their stake as a financial asset measured at fair value. So this stake make leverage goes lower since the stock has gone up 1700% since 2024, but I don’t think they will exit their investment in this company but it could be a source to derisk the balance sheet further.

https://boudreaucapital.substack.com/p/...en-full-year-2025-the-capex
 

Rakuten AI 3.0 Now Available, Japan’s Largest High-Performance AI Model Developed as Part of the GENIAC Project

- Latest LLM released to accelerate Japan’s AI development, with excellent scores across multiple Japanese benchmarks

Tokyo, March 17, 2026 – Rakuten Group, Inc. released its latest Japanese large language model (LLM), Rakuten AI 3.0, developed as part of the Generative AI Accelerator Challenge (GENIAC) project promoted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). Unveiled in December 2025 and now fine-tuned, Rakuten AI 3.0 is Japan’s largest high-performance AI model that empowers companies and professionals developing AI applications.

Available free under the Apache 2.0 license from the official Rakuten Group Hugging Face repository, Rakuten AI 3.0 is optimized for the Japanese language and excels at tasks including writing, code generation, document analysis and extraction. Compared to Rakuten's earlier models, it achieves significantly higher accuracy and more robust performance.

In July 2025, Rakuten was selected for the third term of the GENIAC project to develop Japanese language-optimized AI models. Part of the training cost for Rakuten AI 3.0 was provided by the GENIAC project, which offers support for computing resources necessary for Japan’s generative AI development.

Ting Cai, Chief AI & Data Officer of Rakuten Group, commented, “Rakuten is committed to delivering high-quality, cost-efficient models that empower businesses and users.  Rakuten AI 3.0, our largest and most competitive model, is an outstanding combination of data, engineering and innovative architecture at scale. By sharing open models, we aim to accelerate AI development in Japan. We are excited for the opportunity to work with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to foster a collaborative AI development community that drives progress for all.”

Best-in-class Japanese performance

Rakuten AI 3.0 (LLM) compared to leading models focusing on the Japanese language
Rakuten evaluated the model across multiple Japanese benchmarks, assessing capabilities in Japan-specific cultural knowledge, history, graduate-level reasoning, competitive mathematics and instruction following. Scores of the new model checkpoint were compared with leading models.
Rakuten is continuously pushing the boundaries of innovation to develop best-in-class LLMs for R&D and deliver best-in-class AI services to its customers. By making the models open to all, Rakuten aims to contribute to the open-source community and accelerate the development of local AI applications and Japanese language LLMs.

About Rakuten AI 3.0

Rakuten AI 3.0, is an approximately 700 billion parameter Mixture of Experts (MoE) model optimized for Japanese. Developed by leveraging the best from the open source community and building on Rakuten’s high-quality, bilingual original data, engineering and research, it offers a superior grasp of Japanese language and culture.

https://global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2026/...&category=corp
 

https://seekingalpha.com/article/...game-changing-year-rating-upgrade
 

Das Vorzugszinsprogramm „Bonuszinssatz“ der Rakuten Bank zeigt die jeweils gültigen Zinssätze jetzt über die App an – so können Kunden jederzeit auf einen Blick den Zinssatz ihres regulären Sparkontos überprüfen.

16. März 2026

Die Rakuten Bank freut sich bekannt zu geben, dass sie ab dem 16. März 2026 (Montag) eine Funktion in die Rakuten Bank App integriert hat, mit der Kunden den für ihr beliebtes Yen-Einlagen-Vorzugsprogramm „Bonuszinssatz geltenden Zinssatz einfach überprüfen können.

Der „Bonuszins“ der Rakuten Bank ist ein Vorzugszinsprogramm, das den Zinssatz Ihres regulären Sparkontos abhängig von Ihrer Nutzung erhöht. Dazu gehören beispielsweise der Empfang von Gehalt, Boni und Rentenzahlungen, die Nutzung von Lastschriften von anderen Konten als der Rakuten Card, die Verwendung Ihrer Debitkarte und die Nutzung von Rakuten Mobile. Kunden, die Rakuten Mobile ab Februar 2026 abonnieren, erhalten einen maximalen Jahreszins von 0,64 % (0,509 % nach Steuern) auf ihr Yen-Sparkonto. Dieser Zinssatz ergibt sich aus der Kombination des Bonuszinssatzes und des Vorzugszinssatzes für die Nutzung von „Money Bridge,
einem Service, der Konten mit Rakuten Securities verknüpft. Das entspricht mehr als dem Doppelten des regulären Zinssatzes und macht das Konto zum „Ultimativen Sparkonto. Mit dieser neuen Funktion können Kunden in der App ganz einfach prüfen, welche Services aktuell für den Bonuszinssatz berechtigt sind. Zusätzlich steht ihnen eine Simulation zur Verfügung, um zu sehen, wie stark sich der Zinssatz ihres regulären Sparkontos durch die Nutzung der neuen Services erhöht. Dies wird den Kunden ganz klar den optimalen Weg aufzeigen, um zu noch günstigeren Zinssätzen zu gelangen.
Kunden, die Rakuten Bank noch nicht als Konto für Gehalts-, Bonus- oder Rentenzahlungen eingerichtet haben, können beispielsweise über die App prüfen, wie sich diese Änderungen auf ihren Zinssatz auswirken. Nutzen Sie diese Gelegenheit und erhöhen Sie den Zinssatz Ihres regulären Sparkontos, wodurch Sie effizienter Vermögen aufbauen können. Darüber hinaus profitieren Sie von Vorzugszinsen durch verschiedene Services, die auf Ihre Bedürfnisse zugeschnitten sind, wie z. B. die Einrichtung von Lastschriften von anderen Konten als Ihrer Rakuten Card oder die Nutzung von Rakuten Mobile.

https://www.rakuten-bank.co.jp/press/2026/260316.html


 

https://network.mobile.rakuten.co.jp/fee/unext/?wovn=en
 

Branchenführer! Rakuten Securities erweitert die Anzahl der auf "Rakuten FX" angebotenen Währungspaare auf insgesamt 38
– darunter 10 neue Währungspaare, darunter Ungarischer Forint/Yen und Tschechische Krone/Yen.
16. März

https://www.rakuten-sec.co.jp/web/company/newsrelease/fy2026.html

 

Rakuten Card + Rakuten Bank + Rakuten Securities

$403 million + $481 million + $283 million = $ 1.167 billion Non-GAAP operating income

Rakuten Card (85% ownership): Non-GAAP operating income increased by only 2.3% to $403 million USD and for revenue it grew 13.2% to $2.3 billion.

Rakuten Bank (49% ownership): For the profit it was $481 million, up 51.6% mainly due to an increase in interest income from the deposit.

Rakuten Securities (51% ownership): On the revenue side, it grew 21.7% to $1 billion with operating income of $283 million, up 42%.
 

https://boudreaucapital.substack.com/p/...en-full-year-2025-the-capex  

a valuation of $23.34 billion,

In the average of the three parts owning Rakuten about 65% = a value of $ 15.17billion  

Revenues in 2025 was 1.4 trillion Yen and Non GAAP Operating Income was 100.3 billion Yen = about $ 630 million. That are by a P/E of 18 = $ 11.3 billion.
 

Rakuten Internet Division = $ 11.3 billion
Rakuten Fintech Division = $ 23.43 billion,  ownership of 65% = $ 15.17 billion
Rakuten Mobile Division = $ 0 billion (but could  increase dramatically in the future)
Cabify and other smaller ownerships = $ 1 billion
31 million AST Space Mobile shares = $ 3 billion

That together $ 30.47 billion.

Divided through 2.15 billon shares = $ 14.17/share

 

Rakuten AI and Google are driving the next generation of autonomous agents

1 day ago

Superintelligent virtual assistants and autonomous robots still feel like something out of a science fiction novel. But are we really that far off? One session at the most recent Rakuten Technology Conference in Tokyo explored this very question.
Rakuten’s Director of the AI Services Supervisory Department Taku Okoshi was joined by Hamidou Dia, VP of Applied AI Engineering at Google, for a discussion on the next generation of autonomous agents. Together, they walked the audience through how we arrived at this stage of AI evolution, and what might lie beyond the horizon.
“We are on the cusp of the biggest technology platform shift of our lifetime,” Dia stressed. “AI agents are the next frontier in this platform shift, and we are just at the very, very beginning of this AI era.”
No longer just chatbots
For Okoshi, who serves as an executive officer at Rakuten Group, this shift is already visible. Rakuten operates more than 70 different services in Japan alone, engaging with over 100 million users in e-commerce, banking, payments, travel, mobile, and more.
This scale and diversity present a unique challenge for Rakuten: Can AI graduate from simply answering questions, to taking action across the Rakuten Ecosystem?
“We set AI-nization* as a keyword across Rakuten Group. On a daily basis, we are fully utilizing our AI capability,” Okoshi said. “We want to set AI as a gate of the Rakuten Ecosystem. This is our latest vision and mission.”
This mission has advanced rapidly from internal optimizations to consumer-facing products. Rakuten AI can now act as a central agent, connecting shopping, hotel recommendations and even music streaming.
Rakuten Travel has launched an intelligent concierge that can help plan trips, discover hotels, and explore destinations. Okoshi highlighted how a collaboration with Google has allowed the agent to combine Rakuten’s travel data with public web information to overlay on Google Maps.
“Thanks to Google’s technology, we can fully integrate Google Maps capability into our agent.”
A process that previously required searching, filtering and navigating apps is rapidly transforming into a single step-by-step conversation that remembers context.
“These agents are very different from what we used to know about AI bots,” Dia explained. “These intelligent agents can reason, plan, take action on behalf of a human, and most importantly, they can also have memory.”
How did we get here, and where are we going?
“This whole thing started with the chatbot, right?” Dia said. “You put in a prompt and get a lot of information.”
Around two years ago, the AI scene was abuzz with talk of retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a tech that allowed LLMs to reference concrete data in their answers and avoid hallucination.
“Then LLMs started introducing reasoning capabilities, and also the ability to do function calling,” Dia continued. “Then we entered the tooling phase – reasoning, multi-step reasoning – and we started building agents. Now we are really in the multiple-agent system era.”
But the journey is far from over.
“We are all marching toward what we call AGI – artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence,” Dia said. “Multimodality – models that can reason across text, image, video, audio, coding and music. Then world models – models that generate environments dynamically. Then multiple-agent systems that leverage real-world, multimodal generation and feed it into physical agents.”
This trajectory doesn’t stop at software. “That’s what’s going to enable this paradigm shift – allowing us to get to physical agents with advanced reasoning.”
So where are the robots?
“Once we move from software-based agents and intelligence agents, how do we get into the real world?” Dia posed. “That’s where we are heading.”
He showed a demo video of an AI-powered robot sorting waste according to San Francisco rules – green bin for compost, blue for recycling, and black for regular trash.
“Sounds easy, but it’s extremely complex for a robot to understand those types of instructions and perform those tasks,” he stressed. “The physical environment is very challenging – it’s unforgiving compared to software.”
This is one of three reasons, Dia argued, that robotics is lagging behind the software side of AI. “In the digital world, when you’re dealing with bytes and pixels, if an error happens, you can undo it,” he noted. “In robotics, you can kill someone or break something. The physical environment is much more complex.”
The second reason: a lack of data.
“For LLMs, for example, Meta Llama 3 was trained on 15 trillion words. There’s a massive amount of internet data to train software agents,” he said. “The largest publicly available dataset for robotic actions is about 2.4 million examples. That’s nothing.”
This is one major challenge facing Google’s efforts in AI-powered robotics. “It’s extremely challenging to get real robotic action data to train these models. That’s why we’re focused on building generative models for the real world.”
And finally: expense. “Costs have gone down significantly, but physical robots are still very expensive.”
According to Dia, Google’s future lies in the models powering future robots.
“Google’s focus is not robot engineering itself, but model development that runs on top of robotics,” he explained. “We’re not building physical robots. We’re building the best robotic models that organizations can use to power robots.”
A new battleground: trust, safety, and control
As AI agents become more capable and autonomous robots become a possibility, the challenges facing the AI industry shift. Sheer intelligence is no longer enough; enterprises must now grapple with the question of whether these systems can be trusted.
“Security is also about looking at principles,” Dia remarked. “Privacy for all your data. Making sure when you are building this agent, your IP is protected. Your data is within the perimeter of your enterprise.”
It’s a question of particular importance for companies like Rakuten, with many different businesses, spanning everything from finance to telecommunications.
“Each business has regulations from the Japanese government or industry,” Okoshi said. “According to these regulations, we need flexibility in our AI agent platform and systems.”
“For Google, what’s important is openness – open source, open standards,” Dia offered. “In this agentic era, it’s important to define open standards and build frameworks that allow every organization to leverage an open system.”
All of this must reside atop a foundation of strong governance, incorporating role-based access, enterprise policies, compliance certifications and data residency.
“How do you make sure that if there are strong sovereignty requirements, not only is the data residing in the country, but the processing is also happening in the country?”
As we enter this new, agentic phase, the future of AI may not be decided by raw intelligence, but by who can make it safe, flexible and predictable enough to operate inside real organizations.

https://rakuten.today/blog/...xt-generation-of-autonomous-agents.html

 

March 17, 2026

Anil Sawkar, Partha Seetala, Vivek Murthy and Ryan, Presidents of the RAN, Cloud, OSS and Internet Services Business Units sit down for a panel discussion to talk about the latest updates from their teams and plans for 2026.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JCTIp2rVbs

 

March 17, 2026

Leaders take the stage at the Rakuten Booth Theatre during mwc26 to discuss how they are leveraging the power of the Rakuten Ecosystem and share the latest developments across Rakuten Mobile, Rakuten TV and Rakuten International.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgghWDSSA68