KDDI launches Avatar Canvas, an AI avatar platform for customer service and staff training

KDDI announced Avatar Canvas on 27 October and began offering it to corporate customers on 2 November. The platform is built on an AI avatar system developed by partner AVITA Inc. (Meguro-ku, Tokyo; CEO Hiroshi Ishiguro), whose services include AVACOM and the AI roleplay and AI interview product Avatore.

Avatar Canvas bundles staff-facing and customer-facing modules. On the staff side: AI roleplay with automatic scoring and feedback for sales and service skills, AI-led candidate interviews that flag follow-up points for human interviewers, and AI-led mental health interviews, with a feature addition planned for spring 2027. On the customer side: AI remote service in which avatars gather customer needs and route them to the right service or tenant, an AI concierge that mixes AI with human remote operators across signage and smartphones, and industry-specific remote service for settings such as construction sites and ships. Other features include multilingual guidance, logging of service history and operations, and a payment flow in which the customer registers payment details on their own smartphone via a QR code on the terminal, which KDDI says is patented (Patent No. 7829783) and means no card data is stored on the terminal. The AI roleplay feature launches the same day for staff at au Style and au shops nationwide, around 2,000 locations. KDDI cites labour shortages and staff turnover in multi-store retail and service businesses as the motivation. The release does not state pricing.

Why it matters for digital humans: The architecture here is the one enterprises actually buy: an avatar handles first contact and triage, then hands off to a remote human for anything consequential. It is also a reminder that the largest near-term deployments are internal — roleplay, interviewing, onboarding — rather than customer-facing. KDDI publishes no efficacy or deflection data, so the claimed training and staffing benefits are unevidenced for now. The AVITA tie-up is worth noting: Hiroshi Ishiguro's group has worked on avatar-mediated remote work for years, and this gives that stack telco-scale distribution.