SERVICE 03 ／ AI STAFF
Two people,
doing the work of ten.
This is the normal shape of a Japan entry team, and it is why the repeatable work — enquiry triage, record keeping, weekly reporting — is the first thing to slip. AI Staff takes that work, runs it every day, and logs what it did.
Which work is worth handing to AI, and which is not?
Work that happens repeatedly, follows a describable rule, and produces a checkable output. Everything else stays with a person.
Good candidates
- Enquiry triage
- Read the Japanese enquiry, classify it, draft a reply for approval, write the record to the CRM
- Research
- Company background, industry context and competitor movement, compiled into a consistent brief
- Reporting
- The weekly or monthly pack somebody currently assembles by hand from three systems
- Data cleanup
- Duplicate detection, field completion, normalizing company names between Japanese and English spellings
Poor candidates
Anything where the rule cannot be written down, where the output cannot be checked, or where being wrong once is unacceptable. We will tell you when a process you have asked about falls into this group. Automating it would produce confident output that nobody can verify, which is worse than the manual version.
How do we know what the AI actually did?
Alerting when something fails, an audit log of every action, and a monthly report in English. All three are standard, not add-ons.
Audit log
Every action is recorded with its input and output. When someone asks why a particular enquiry was routed the way it was, there is an answer.
Alerting
Failures surface immediately rather than being discovered a fortnight later when a number looks wrong.
Human approval where it matters
Anything customer-facing is drafted, not sent. A person approves before it leaves. This is a design choice we do not negotiate away.
Monthly report
In English: what was handled, what failed, and where the automation should be adjusted next.
What does it cost?
JPY 300,000 per month flat. The initial build is quoted after the scope is defined.
- Initial build
- Quoted individually. Depends on how many processes and system integrations are in scope
- Monthly
- JPY 300,000 — flat, regardless of which processes are running
- Included monthly
- Alerting, audit logs, monthly report, changes to existing automations
- Minimum term
- 6 months
- Licences
- Contracted in your name, billed at cost, not marked up
The monthly fee is flat by design. Charging per automated process would give us an incentive to automate things that should not be automated.
FAQFrequently asked questions
Scope, cost, oversight and what your security team will ask.
Q. What is “AI Staff” in practice? Is it a product?
No. It is a set of automations we build and then operate for you, named that way because the unit of work is a job rather than a tool. A typical one reads incoming Japanese enquiries, classifies them, drafts a reply for a human to approve, and writes the record to your CRM. Another reads your pipeline weekly and produces the report someone currently assembles by hand.
Q. Why does a Japan entry team need this?
Because Japan entry teams are deliberately small — often two or three people — while the work is not proportionally smaller. Someone still has to triage enquiries in Japanese, keep records clean, chase quotations, and produce the report head office expects. That work is repeatable and it is exactly what gets dropped when the team is stretched.
Q. What does it cost?
JPY 300,000 per month, flat, regardless of which processes are automated. The initial build is quoted separately because it depends entirely on how many processes and system integrations are in scope — we define the boundary and agree hours at JPY 20,000 per hour before quoting. Minimum term is 6 months.
Q. What is included in the monthly fee?
Running the automations, alerting when something fails, audit logs of what the AI did, and a monthly report in English covering what it handled and how it performed. Changes to existing automations are included; entirely new processes are scoped as additional build work.
Q. What about data security and what our head office will allow?
Software licences — including the AI platform — are contracted in your name and billed at cost, so your legal team reviews the same terms they would review directly. We do not put credentials or secrets into shared configuration. Tell us your data residency and vendor approval constraints on the first call; some of them will rule out specific processes, and it is better to find that out before the build than during it.