How avatarin built a 24/7 retail agent with GPT-Realtime

Japan-based AI customer service company avatarin has teamed up with Yamada Holdings to launch the Kurashi-Marugoto AI Agent for Yamada Denki, providing 24/7 multilingual support on the retailer's online store. Built using OpenAI's GPT-Realtime, the shopping agent combines voice, text, and visual understanding into a single conversational experience with low latency. Unlike conventional chatbots that rely on specific keywords, avatarin's agent listens for context and helps guide shoppers through product discovery and purchase decisions by incorporating Yamada Denki's customer service knowledge. During a two-week public campaign, approximately 30,000 users interacted with the agent, and 92 percent of survey responses were positive. Customers reported that the agent felt easier to talk to than human associates and allowed them to ask questions after store hours without feeling sales pressure. OpenAI assisted avatarin in structuring prompts, optimizing API costs, and sharing implementation best practices for the always-on voice service. Moving forward, avatarin envisions expanding this intelligence across the web, phone, and physical stores to maintain continuous context for customers. Company representatives highlight that the shift toward general-purpose, multimodal intelligence enables AI to better reflect specific brand identities and provide more natural customer interactions.