JA Yokohama and CTC Begin a Demonstration Experiment Utilizing Generative AI for Administrative Procedure Efficiency Improvement

Yokohama Agricultural Cooperative Association (Kenichi Yagishita, President of the Union; hereinafter "JA Yokohama" ) and ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Tatsushi Shingu, President and CEO; hereinafter "CTC" ) will start a demonstration experiment for streamlining administrative procedures by leveraging the purpose-built generative AI service of Aitomatic, Inc. (headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA; hereinafter "AITOMATIC" ).

JA Yokohama has a wide range of business areas, including finance, JA Kyosai or mutual life/non-life insurance, operation of directly run stores that sell agricultural and livestock products, sale of agricultural materials, and provision of guidance for agricultural producers. Therefore, each employee has to learn an array of business tasks and products. In this situation, less experienced employees have to spend a lot of time dealing with inquiries and identifying what they should do as their tasks, which has been one of the issues JA Yokohama has to resolve.

The purpose of this demonstration experiment is to develop a chatbot that can provide senior employee level answers to questions from junior JA Yokohama employees. We will be introducing a generative AI-powered chatbot to provide answers for inquiries about their credit business involving deposits and transaction verifications, both of which have a particularly large number of administrative procedures and related manuals.

Prior to the experiment, we conducted interviews with experienced senior employees to find out what perspectives they use when referring to manuals for the information they are looking for to answer questions, and trained the chatbot to follow their know-hows to generate answers accordingly. Assuming a case where an inquiry is vague and the correct manual for the inquiry cannot be found, we repeatedly ask questions to clarify purposes of questions. In order to enable the chatbot to respond to inquiries with a high degree of accuracy, their employees will actually use it and we will work on accuracy verification and improvement with repeated tuning utilizing their feedback.

In addition, we will add text information to complex diagrams and tables in manuals and digitize them by using "data preparation service" provided by CTC HINARI Corporation, CTC’s special-purpose subsidiary, aiming to further improve the accuracy of the chatbot's responses.

The chatbot utilizing AITOMATIC's purpose-built generative AI automatically identifies inquiry intents based on contexts, background, and situations of dialogues to generate appropriate answers, even for vague inquiries. It can infer administrative procedures related to inquiries, identify purposes and intents of questions to generate a list of questions to narrow down expected procedures. Furthermore, a generative AI-powered chatbot was developed specifically for each of the task domains such as savings and online banking, making it easier to tune and maintain the accuracy of its responses.

JA Yokohama is a member the JA-DX Promotion Study Group^*1, which was established to promote digitization of JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives), and CTC is a supporter of the Group. Through this demonstration experiment, we will contribute to digitization of JA Yokohama.

Going forward, JA Yokohama and CTC will consider expanding the scope of generative AI use in JA business operations, with the aim of its use in other JA Group cooperatives.