InGauge Releases New Feature "AI Employee" for Re:lation, Enabling Autonomous Support with Just Manuals

InGauge Inc. (Headquarters: Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture; President and CEO: Tetsuya Wada; hereinafter referred to as InGauge) is pleased to announce the release of "AI Employee," a new feature for its communication platform "Re:lation (Relation)." This feature autonomously makes judgments and handles customer inquiries by simply reading provided manuals.

This will help build a next-generation customer support system that minimizes training time for the entire team, allowing everyone to be immediately effective with uniform quality.

◆ Background and Development Story of "AI Employee" Release

1 Structural Challenges in the Field: Monday Morning Email Backlogs, Loss of Know-how, and Employee Turnover

Re:lation has supported customer service for many companies as a service that centralizes inquiries from email, chat, and other channels. As we listened to our customers' voices daily, we witnessed serious structural challenges faced by the field. Support was not possible outside of business hours, leading to a massive backlog of unprocessed inquiries every Monday morning. Staff turnover was relentless, triggered by the mental stress of handling difficult cases or complaints, and a lack of capacity to train new employees. Furthermore, experience-based know-how resided with individuals, causing multiple people to repeat the same trial-and-error processes, preventing knowledge from accumulating within the organization. This negative cycle was occurring in many workplaces.

2 Generative AI Breaks Through the "Maintenance Wall" of Conventional Chatbots

Conventional "dictionary-based (scenario-based) chatbots" had a narrow scope of support and required the continuous preparation and updating of extensive knowledge bases in advance. Consequently, we received feedback from the field stating, "The maintenance of the knowledge base itself is time-consuming, and ultimately, the workload doesn't decrease," and "The field doesn't have the capacity to perform such value-added tasks."

The rapid evolution of generative AI became the catalyst for fundamentally solving this problem. Thinking, "Generative AI might be able to handle a wider range of situations more flexibly," we first implemented an "AI that can answer anything about Re:lation" internally for experimentation. When this AI was introduced to the channels where development and support departments previously answered internal questions, it reached a level where human intervention was barely necessary. We became convinced that "if it can deliver such dramatic value internally, it should be able to provide the same experience to our customers," and proceeded with full-scale development.

3 The Philosophy of "AI Employee," Not "AI Chatbot"

Customer support is not just about "answering questions." In addition to daily inquiries, there are numerous practical tasks that span external services, such as inventory management, cancellation processing, and various administrative procedures. A "bot" that only provides answers cannot fundamentally solve the real challenges faced by the field. Therefore, we designed this feature not as a single-function tool, but as an "AI Employee" with roles, personalities, and authority, capable of being entrusted with work just like a human.

To ensure immediate adoption even in resource-constrained environments, we pursued an operational feel similar to that of a human. Simply selecting "AI Employee" in the case assignment field allows it to operate autonomously, as if a new operator has joined the team. By simply feeding it the same manuals given to new operators, it understands the background knowledge and provides natural, highly accurate customer support.

Furthermore, our actual situation survey revealed that workplaces struggling with staff shortages and overwhelming inquiry volumes have a strong expectation for AI utilization.

<Actual Situation Survey on AI Utilization in Customer Support>

In recent years, with the decline in the working population, improving operational efficiency with limited personnel has become an urgent task in all industries. An actual situation survey conducted by InGauge targeting business professionals involved in daily customer support revealed that 52% of respondents feel a "staff shortage."

Moreover, the workload borne by field staff is immense. According to the same survey, approximately one in five people in the field are facing a large volume of inquiries, with "over 500 cases per month." This trend is particularly prominent in "Finance and Insurance (31%)" and "Real Estate and Goods Leasing (30%)," where routine inquiries such as contract details confirmation and property availability checks tend to concentrate during specific periods, significantly exacerbating the shortage of limited personnel and time.

While overwhelmed by such a large volume of inquiries, 55% of workplaces report that it takes "more than half a year" for new employees to become independent, and 63% of teams face the deep-rooted issue of "knowledge silos," where "only this person knows how to handle it."

To address these specific pain points of the field—"dependence on specific individuals" and "vast amounts of routine work"—InGauge developed "AI Employee," which functions by simply handing over existing manuals, much like training a human. By having the AI Employee handle initial responses for daily inquiries (answering frequently asked questions and providing support during peak seasons), veteran employees can reallocate their resources to resolving knowledge silos and focusing on more complex "difficult consultations."

<Survey Overview> Survey Name: Actual Situation Survey on AI Utilization in Customer Support Survey Method: Online Survey Survey Period: June 3, 2026 - June 11, 2026 Valid Responses: 5,000 for screening, 484 for main survey Download the detailed report here: https://ingage.jp/relation/download/ai-cs-survey/

◆ Overview of the New Feature "AI Employee"

"AI Employee" is a groundbreaking feature that allows users to set a personality and load company manuals, enabling it to autonomously make judgments and handle customer support like a new staff member, without the need for complex conditional branching scenario design or prompt creation. It can be seamlessly integrated as a team member (operator) without disrupting the existing operational flow of human representatives.

1 "Personality Settings" to Embody Brand Image

Users can adjust personality traits such as "politeness," "response speed," and "empathy" with simple slider operations to match the company's image and customer base. It maintains uniform response quality with a character that reflects the company's identity.

2 Immediate Effectiveness by Simply Providing Existing "Manuals"

It begins autonomous operations by simply registering training manuals for new operators or service overviews that serve as prerequisite knowledge, in natural language. This eliminates the effort of building AI-specific systems from scratch and minimizes training time.

3 Start Work by Assigning to a Representative

Work can begin by simply selecting the AI Employee on the Re:lation screen. By entrusting repetitive inquiries via email, chat, LINE, etc., to the AI, users can concentrate on cases that truly require human attention.

~Complex issues that cannot be resolved are smoothly handed over to humans~

All interaction histories can be viewed in real-time. Issues that the AI Employee can easily resolve are completed, and for complex inquiries that are difficult to handle, a secure collaboration system is in place to immediately hand over the interaction to a human (human escalation) along with a report based on the conversation, without forcing the AI to attempt a resolution.

◆ Comment from Product Manager, Ryo Tokiwa

The field faces challenges that have been difficult to solve until now, such as an unmanageable volume of daily inquiries, loss of know-how due to repeated employee turnover, and increasing training costs. We wanted to fundamentally change these challenges with the concept of "AI Employee." The "AI Employee" released this time is not just a chatbot; it is designed to be an entity that can be entrusted with work with the same operational feel as a human. It is truly an AI as a "colleague to work with." Even in the field trials already underway, significant, visible effects are emerging. The burden on the field is reduced, and customer satisfaction is increasing. We want everyone to experience this sense of accomplishment.

◆ About Re:lation

Re:lation is a communication platform that centrally manages multiple inquiry channels such as email, phone, chat, and social media, and allows teams to share information. In addition to visualizing response status and providing AI-powered response support, it handles task and process management within the tool. By accurately grasping work progress, it prevents knowledge silos and enables standardized operations.

It transforms accumulated response logs and knowledge into organizational assets, supporting "proactive customer support" that goes beyond preventing mistakes. With over 6,000 companies adopted (※1), it contributes to improving corporate productivity and business growth.

Re:lation Service Site: https://ingage.jp (※1) Includes trial usage.

About InGauge Inc.

Location: 1-14-8 Shibata, Kita-ku, Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture Representative: President and CEO Tetsuya Wada Business Activities: Development and provision of cloud services, development and provision of the communication platform "Re:lation" Corporate Site: https://ingage.co.jp

Contact for Inquiries Regarding This Release

Contact Person: InGauge Inc. Public Relations Representative: Nishizawa TEL: 050-3116-8373 E-mail: pr@ingage.jp