Aitomatic is excited to partner with ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and JA Yokohama to improve agricultural administrative efficiency.

By leveraging Aitomatic's industrial agentic AI technology, the teams will develop a domain-specialist AI assistant that understands employee inquiries, provides accurate responses, and guides them through related procedures.

The AI assistant will help JA Yokohama employees handle tasks and inquiries with the proficiency of experienced staff — leading to faster response, streamlined processes, and improved efficiency.

We look forward to collaborating on this groundbreaking initiative, using AI to transform agricultural operations.

Experiment overview

JA Yokohama operates across a broad range of businesses — finance, mutual aid, farm-produce direct sales, agricultural-materials sales, and farming guidance for producers — so each employee must master a wide variety of tasks and products. For less-experienced staff, a great deal of time was being spent handling inquiries and confirming procedures. This proof-of-concept develops a chatbot that answers internal questions at the level of a veteran employee, focusing first on credit-business operations such as deposits and transaction verification, where administrative procedures and manuals are especially numerous.

Ahead of the experiment, veteran staff were interviewed on how they decide which manual to consult for a given question, and the chatbot was trained to follow that expertise. To handle ambiguous inquiries that might not reach the correct manual, the assistant asks clarifying follow-up questions to pin down intent. Staff use the system in practice, and accuracy is validated and improved through repeated feedback and tuning. CTC's special-subsidiary CTC Hinari also contributes its data-preparation service, adding text information to the complex figures and tables inside manuals to further improve answer accuracy.

Because the generative AI is distributed by specific domain — deposits, net banking, and so on — accuracy tuning and maintenance are also easier. CTC participates as a supporter company in the JA-DX study group, which promotes digitalization across Japan's agricultural cooperatives, and will continue contributing to JA Yokohama's digital transformation. Looking ahead, JA Yokohama and CTC plan to expand the use of generative AI across JA operations, with other cooperatives in mind.

  • Purpose: business efficiency through generative AI
  • Period: April–July 2024
  • Scope: inquiry handling in credit-business operations
  • Training data: credit-business administrative manuals