SORAMICHI and PLAID Announce Joint Development of AI-BPO Services in the CX Domain

SORAMICHI Inc. (Headquarters: Tokyo, President and CEO: Koji Kawamoto, hereinafter "SORAMICHI") and PLAID Inc. (Headquarters: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO: Kenta Kurahashi, hereinafter "PLAID") today announced the joint development of AI-powered CX consulting and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) services.

Through this partnership, both companies will jointly verify and develop an "AI-BPO Service" that combines SORAMICHI's AI operation platform and AI agents (such as Google's "Gemini Enterprise" and Anthropic's "Claude") with PLAID's product suite, including the CX platform "KARTE." This service will leverage AI to support KARTE operations through KARTE's API/MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration.

What is the AI Operation Platform? — The Operational Foundation Supporting AI-BPO

This platform serves as the operational infrastructure that integrates generative AI, such as Claude, with KARTE. It is designed as a human-in-the-loop operational framework where AI handles the generation of hypothesis for measures, data analysis, draft creation for implementation, and proposal of operational commands, while humans focus on strategy, planning, and verification.

Key Features

AI Proposal Queue: Centrally manages measures hypotheses and improvement proposals generated by AI, along with their reliability, risk scores, and supporting data, to aid in approval/rejection decisions.

MCP Execution Management: Visualizes and controls the MCP tools (segmentation, customer engagement, event definition, reporting, Datahub) that AI uses to operate KARTE. The operational design ensures that only approved actions are reflected in the production environment.

Analysis Dashboard: Integrates with KARTE Datahub to display user interruption analysis, scoring, and measure hypotheses in a unified view. AI's observations, facts, and inferences are presented with distinct labels.

Audit Log: Stores logs of AI execution, human approval, production deployment, and rollbacks. The design incorporates controls that consider the compliance requirements of the financial and insurance industries.

Shift in Roles — From Human-Centric to Collaborative Operation with AI

The differences between conventional operations and AI-BPO operations lie in the following roles: measure hypothesis generation (humans create from scratch → AI generates drafts, humans decide adoption), data analysis (humans aggregate and interpret → AI performs initial analysis and summarization, humans decide on deeper dives), implementation (humans set up and deploy → AI executes with approval), approval/rejection (humans decide → humans make final decisions with support from risk scores, etc.), and the role of humans (more task-oriented → focus on strategy, planning, and verification).

Background of the Partnership

In recent years, while the adoption of CX platforms has expanded, securing personnel capable of continuously and high-qualityly planning, implementing, and verifying measures has become a common industry challenge. SORAMICHI has a proven track record in operational consulting for major CX platforms, including KARTE, and has accumulated operational expertise, particularly in the enterprise domain, including finance and insurance.

As generative AI becomes more practical, areas like implementation and analysis are increasingly being replaced by AI. Consequently, the value of areas such as strategy, planning, and verification—the "why, what, and how to decide"—is relatively increasing. This partnership aims to co-create a new operational model in the CX consulting domain by combining the strengths of both companies (PLAID's products × SORAMICHI's consulting achievements × generative AI utilization).

Overview of Services to be Provided

The AI-BPO Service will consist of four layers: strategy, planning, implementation, and verification. By optimizing AI utilization in each layer, it aims to provide new operational value through collaboration between AI and humans.

Key Service Features

Through the AI Operation Platform, AI will assist in generating measure hypotheses, data analysis, and creating implementation drafts.

Through KARTE's API/MCP integration, a mechanism will be jointly verified and developed for AI to safely support KARTE operations (segmentation/customer engagement/event definition/reporting, etc.).

A Human-in-the-Loop design combining human judgment and AI execution will be implemented, with production deployment subject to approval (assuming multi-person review), designed to meet the control requirements of the financial and insurance industries.

AI will score risks from legal, brand, and system perspectives, and XAI (Explainable AI) will be used to hierarchically unfold the AI's reasoning process, thereby enhancing decision transparency.

Data will be managed separately for each client, and skills and references will be securely managed.

Multiple plans will be offered according to company size and requirements, catering to a wide range of needs from enterprises to growing companies.

Roles of Each Company

Future Schedule

Within 2026: Commence joint proposals and promote joint verification and phased development of the AI Operation Platform and KARTE integration.

Fiscal Year 2027: Expand joint proposal targets and establish a service provision system for AI-BPO services.

Mid-to-Long Term: Aim to establish a service model in the AI-BPO domain.

Comments

Koji Kawamoto, President and CEO, SORAMICHI Inc.

Through CX consulting and operational support for CX platforms like KARTE, SORAMICHI has supported customer understanding and measure execution for enterprise clients in industries such as finance, insurance, and retail. On the other hand, as the utilization of customer data becomes more sophisticated, the shortage of specialized personnel to continuously handle analysis, implementation, and verification has become a major challenge. Through our collaboration with PLAID, we will combine KARTE's real-time customer data utilization platform with our CX consulting and AI operation platform to jointly build a human-in-the-loop operational model where humans focus on strategy, planning, and final judgment, while AI supports practical tasks such as analysis and draft creation for implementation. Through our AI-BPO service, we aim to go beyond mere operational efficiency and establish a new standard for CX operations that leads to the business growth of our client companies.

Kenta Kurahashi, President and CEO, PLAID Inc.

At PLAID, with the mission "Maximize the value of people through data," we have built data infrastructure that enables companies to deeply understand each customer. However, the shortage of digital talent, particularly among enterprise companies, is a serious social issue, and a significant gap exists between "valuable data," which is the source of a company's competitiveness, and the "processes that operate it." The AI-BPO service, jointly developed with SORAMICHI, directly addresses this challenge. It seamlessly connects customer's real-time behavioral data and context with CX operational processes using AI, realizing unprecedented business innovation and operational efficiency. Through a human-in-the-loop model that allows people to focus on higher value-added strategy formulation, we will support companies in achieving results, from strategy to operation.

About SORAMICHI Inc.

Focusing on CX consulting, we provide operational support for CRM/MA platforms (such as KARTE) to major companies. We support data-driven CX reforms, primarily in the finance, insurance, and retail industries.

Company Name: SORAMICHI Inc.

Location: 4F CROSSCOOP Shimbashi, 1-1-13 Shimbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo

Representative: Koji Kawamoto, President and CEO

Business Activities: CX Consulting, AI-BPO Services

Website: https://www.sora-michi.co.jp

About PLAID Inc.

PLAID, with its mission "Maximize the value of people through data," is a company that supports the maximization of corporate value based on data. Leveraging its data infrastructure that analyzes vast amounts of customer behavior in real-time and its technology to structure context, PLAID offers a suite of data x AI products and expert support. By supporting companies in achieving customer-centric management, PLAID contributes to sustainable business growth and the creation of value for each individual consumer.

https://plaid.co.jp/

Inquiries Regarding This Release

SORAMICHI Public Relations: Ichikawa, Kitagawa

TEL: 03-6869-5652

FAX: 03-3502-1412

E-MAIL: [email protected]