In the corporate trend toward the era of AI agents, MUFG Bank and Osaka City are advancing full-scale operations and verification, while major companies including DeNA, SOMPO and Rakuten are expanding adoption. Companies are accelerating proof-of-concept projects and platform development aimed at automating business processes.
AI agent adoption is progressing across multiple areas at Japanese companies. On 25 March 2026, MUFG Bank began full-scale operations of Salesforce’s autonomous AI agent, Agentforce 360 for Financial Services. MUFG Bank selected the solution in August 2025, becoming the first company in Japan to do so, and deployed it after approximately 6 months of development.
In the public sector, Osaka City and Hitachi, Ltd. conducted a joint verification project from September 2025 to March 2026 covering the processing of commuter allowance applications by the Osaka City General Affairs Bureau. They tested 4 use cases: application guidance, checking support, eligibility decisions and reimbursement calculations. The project was assessed as having the potential to reduce processing time by up to approximately 40% in the future.
In the private sector, DeNA entered into a strategic partnership with Cognition AI in July 2025. As of March 2026, it had built a platform available for use by approximately 2,000 people. The platform reduced the time required for code migration of its asset-management API from approximately 6 months to just under 1 month, and roughly doubled development speed for the Wandaria Yokohama app. DeNA is also building an environment in which non-engineers can review specifications, with the aim of reducing communication costs by approximately 2,000 hours per month.
In the financial and insurance sectors, SOMPO Holdings introduced an AI agent tool to approximately 30,000 employees on 26 December 2025. From January 2026, it began a proof of concept centred on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise, testing functions including document search and summarisation, support for preparing minutes and assistance with data analysis.
Rakuten Group added its agent-based AI tool, Rakuten AI, to the smartphone app for Rakuten Ichiba on 5 January 2026. The AI concierge recommends products and presents items that match users’ requirements and objectives.
In addition, SoftBank launched a company-wide project in June 2025 under which each employee was tasked with creating 100 AI agents. The company says that more than 2.5 million agents had been created in total in approximately 2.5 months. NTT DATA is also scheduled to begin providing LITRON Builder, a platform for developing business-specific AI agents using natural language, from April 2026.