Trustbank rolls out Choice AI to guide Furusato Nozei donors

TRUSTBANK has developed Choice AI, a conversational recommendation feature that uses OpenAI models to help users discover thank-you gifts under Japan’s Furusato Nozei hometown tax donation scheme.

The company said the feature was built with Recursive, now an official OpenAI services partner, and is integrated into Furusato Choice, one of Japan’s largest platforms, which lists about 760,000 thank-you gifts.

Yuki Tateyama, product general manager at Choice Business HQ, said, “Many people find the hometown tax donation system complicated or intimidating. To address this, we added AI-powered features to our Furusato Choice app to make the process easier to navigate.”

Trustbank said Choice AI uses a multi-agent architecture, with a routing model that assigns tasks to specialised agents, including search, recommendation and greeting agents.

Matthew Whalley, a software engineer at Recursive who led agent development, said, “We combine agents dynamically based on user-specific information. For instance, existing users follow one interaction path, while first-time users follow another. We dynamically generate prompts to manage these interaction paths.”

The system runs on the GPT 4.1 series of models and defaults to GPT 4.1 mini, with experiments underway to switch models based on latency and accuracy, the companies said.

Trustbank said the platform introduces controlled randomness into search results to surface a broader range of municipalities and products and reduce concentration on popular items.

“We introduce randomness and vary recommendations across prefectures based on donation data to support fairness and regional diversity, unless users clearly indicate their preferences,” Whalley said.

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Issei Hirano, head of platform promotion in the product division at Trustbank, said, “We selected Recursive as our partner because of their advanced AI expertise and their global experience.”

Trustbank said it plans to expand the use of artificial intelligence across the service and further refine recommendations to create a concierge-style experience spanning the full Furusato Nozei user journey.

The Recap

• TRUSTBANK launched Choice AI to personalise gift recommendations.
• Furusato Choice lists roughly 760,000 thank-you gifts on the platform.
• Company plans to expand AI and build a concierge-style service.