Japan Pension Service's 'Nenkin Chatbot' Adds Generative AI to Serve 600,000 Annual Users in Six New Languages

Japan Pension Service (Nihon Nenkin Kikou), the public body administering Japan's national and employees' pension schemes, has run a "Nenkin Chatbot" on its website for several years to answer routine questions about enrolment, payments and procedures. Independent Japanese trade press reports the chatbot is now used by roughly 600,000 people a year.
On 6 November 2025, Fujitsu announced it would introduce generative AI into the chatbot's operational support: instead of staff manually authoring every Q&A entry, the AI drafts candidate answers for staff to review, and the service adds machine-generated responses in English, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Tagalog alongside Japanese. The generative-AI-supported version is scheduled to go live in April 2026.
The stated goals, confirmed independently by ITmedia NEWS and Nikkei Business Publications alongside Fujitsu's own announcement, are to reduce the staff workload of keeping the Q&A library current and to extend language coverage for Japan's growing non-Japanese resident population, who previously had no chatbot support in their own language.
At the time of writing, the generative-AI layer had not yet launched, so no post-deployment figures exist for answer accuracy, staff time saved or user satisfaction; all published evidence describes the existing chatbot's usage and the vendor's stated design, not a measured outcome of the AI upgrade itself. Draft Q&A content is intended to be reviewed by Japan Pension Service staff before publication, which limits the risk of unsupervised AI output reaching citizens, but this review step has not been independently verified once the service is live.

Read the full analysis: https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2511/07/news100.html