
LANGCHAIN — How Does Rakuten Group Use LangChain and LangSmith to Provide Premium Products for Business Clients and Employees?
The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before. — Bill Gates
Rakuten Group, a prominent online shopping mall in Japan, has been leveraging LangChain and LangSmith to deliver premium products for its business clients and employees. By adopting new technologies and investing in AI applications, Rakuten has been able to provide a unified product suite to better serve its end users, clients, and employees. Let’s explore how Rakuten Group utilizes LangChain and LangSmith to empower both its business clients and employees.
Empowering Businesses with Rakuten AI
Rakuten AI for Business is a comprehensive AI platform that supports business clients in essential business operations. This platform empowers clients to enhance productivity across various activities, such as market analysis and customer support. LangChain and LangSmith play a critical role in building the following AI-powered products for Rakuten’s business clients:
Rakuten AI Analyst
The Rakuten AI Analyst acts as a research assistant, providing valuable market intelligence to clients. This helps clients gain business insights backed by relevant data and charts.
Rakuten AI Agent
The Rakuten AI Agent supports clients in getting faster, self-serve customer support for their questions related to listing and transacting on the marketplace.
Rakuten AI Librarian
The Rakuten AI Librarian summarizes all of the client’s documentation to answer questions from the client’s end customers and prospects in real time.
Empowering Rakutenians
Rakuten also leveraged LangChain’s OpenGPTs package to deliver an employee empowerment experience, enabling teams to build their own chatbots over internal documentation to help with knowledge management and employee enablement. This initiative only took three engineers one week to get the initial platform up and running, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of LangChain.
Why LangChain and LangSmith?
Rakuten first started building with LangChain in January of 2023, finding it helpful in providing common, successful interaction patterns for building with LLMs. As they scaled up their usage and allowed more users to interact with the applications, they turned to LangSmith to harden their work and provide visibility into the processes and outcomes. LangSmith allows Rakuten to distribute the best prompts, run experiments, and measure the results, providing enterprise assurances and enabling Rakuten to identify the right approaches for using LLMs in an enterprise-setting faster.
Conclusion
Rakuten’s ambition to distribute Rakuten AI for Business across its customer base and to design and build technical architectures for large-scale AI applications across its suite of 70 businesses is made possible with the help of LangChain and LangSmith. These technologies enable Rakuten to achieve its goals faster and more safely, contributing to its mission of empowering people and society through innovation and entrepreneurship.
In conclusion, LangChain and LangSmith play a pivotal role in enabling Rakuten Group to provide premium products for its business clients and employees, demonstrating the potential of these technologies in delivering AI-powered solutions at scale.
