Project Context
Japanese SMEs face a structural labor shortage in customer support and rising expectations for 24/7 service, while generic AI chatbots routinely hallucinate because they don't know the company's own knowledge. OneBot is VAON's proprietary platform that solves both: RAG grounds every answer in the client's documents, a hybrid scripted-plus-generative flow keeps transactional interactions controlled, and the whole stack is delivered OEM/white-label so partners can sell it under their own brand while VAON handles the technology underneath.
Challenges
Customers won't wait
Industry data shows roughly half of customers abandon when reply takes longer than 10 minutes — for an SME without a 24/7 CS team, that's direct revenue loss.
Generic AI hallucinates
Off-the-shelf chatbots confidently produce wrong answers because they have no access to the company's actual knowledge — a single bad answer can destroy trust.
Building this in-house is unrealistic for SMEs
Most SMEs lack the AI engineering capacity to assemble RAG + vector DB + LLM + LINE integration, let alone operate it.
VAON's Solution
Every answer is grounded in the client's documents (PDFs, websites, spreadsheets). The model isn't free to make things up — it's required to cite from a controlled corpus.
Buttons drive structured tasks (order status, returns); generative AI handles open questions. Users get the speed of buttons and the flexibility of language in one interface.
Partners (agencies, SI firms, vertical platforms) resell OneBot under their own brand. They own the customer relationship; VAON operates the platform. Faster market entry for them, recurring SaaS revenue for both.
Value Delivered
~60% of repetitive CS automated, ~1.5× conversion lift, 0-second response 24/7
Hallucination-free by design
Because answers must be grounded in the client's corpus, the platform doesn't trade speed for accuracy — it delivers both.
Native Japan-channel reach
Out-of-the-box LINE Official Account integration puts the bot on Japan's #1 messaging channel from day one — no separate engineering project.
Partner-friendly revenue model
OEM/white-label means partners sell, VAON operates. Recurring SaaS revenue with low partner CAPEX and shared upside.
Technology Stack
Google Gemini
pgvector
PostgreSQL
Python