When we speak of innovation, we imagine groundbreaking opportunities and limitless applications. In today’s era, it’s becoming harder to see something unique as everyone is in the race of offering homogenous solutions with their interventions. Thus, it is very rare to find companies that are offering something futuristic, but also something enterprising!
TradFit develops and provides solutions using Voice AI, and technologies for various industries, including accommodation and healthcare. With their patents and collaborative companies, they continue to solve social issues, aiming to create a new social infrastructure to drive a sustainable future.
Innovation to a change – TradFit
TradFit was founded with a vision to ‘solve inequalities and disparities throughout the world.’ There are always issues to be tackled, they hope to contribute to solving the problems that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed.
In their prospects, they plan to continuously contribute to the tourism and accommodation industry, but additionally to the aviation, restaurant, retail, and healthcare industries.
Overly focusing on growth alone would trap us in seeing nothing but sales and cause us to deviate from the ‘three goods’ principle (good for the seller, good for the buyer, and good for society) that TradFit values.
This is what fuels TradFit and its team’s innovation and dedication to provide products that are not only in sync with just one good, but has ‘three goods’ in them, leading to the overall growth of their clients, buyers, and our society!
Why is TradFit important? Why do we need its services?
Operating 365 days a year, the tourism and accommodation industry is a tough one to run. There are chronic personnel shortages and aspects of coping with languages, increased personnel costs, and operational efficiency issues.
According to data from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare of Japan on the job separation rate, the hiring rate is almost equal to the turnover rate. Regarding languages, the accommodation facilities are unable to cope with multiple languages, leading to lost opportunities. In addition to a shortage of labor, especially ones qualified in understanding various languages, it is also costly to allocate staff who can serve foreign customers.
Also, the COVID-19 pandemic has placed not only tourism and accommodation, but also retail, restaurant, and other industries in a difficult financial situation. This drew attention to TradFit’s service as a way to protect employees while lowering costs by leveraging their services that can be left to AI.
A solution to this is the development of concierge applications that can use AI speakers with graphics supporting multiple languages, and multilingual chat systems, to improve profitability for accommodation facilities. It can also enhance their services still further, be useful for marketing, and give a better work-life balance for employees.
As their service is non-contact as it is operated by voice, and it can be operated and managed remotely from browsers with only a few people. Their service provides safety and security to guests and staff and offers a service that can reduce costs and increase revenues while protecting employment.
Besides its transformative B2C applications in the tourism and hospitality space, TradFit’s advanced technology and AI drive B2B benefits by enhancing revenue-generating opportunities through impactful digital transformation. A key benefit of the company’s B2B-driven applications is its ability to automate hotelier tasks such as inventory management, thereby saving costs and instances of excess inventory.
The Futuristic and Comprehensive service offering of TradFit?
TradFit provides services that allow facilities to focus on providing hospitality to the requests of their guests without being overwhelmed by inquiries from guest rooms. For example, providing recommendations for facilities, tenants, and services inside and outside the accommodation, as well as room service and borrowing of items.
Information rooted in the local community can help to improve satisfaction with the travel experience and to revitalize the economy by creating win-win situations. In addition to contactless voice operation, their chat system combining AI with human response enables integrated management that includes special requests from guests.
By talking to the AI speaker, you can get answers to frequently asked questions, search for restaurants, get directions to nearby sightseeing spots, and control electronic products in the hotel room contactless. Orders for amenities and room service rental can also be placed on the management screen via the AI speaker. Once done, accommodation staffs can be confirmed on a smartphone, preventing order errors and reducing the time spent on the phone.
If the content of the conversation is not in the database, or if the AI speaker cannot respond to the content or language, a QR code is displayed on the screen. The customer’s smartphone can read this to activate the multilingual chat system and continue the response. The multilingual chat system is available in 16 languages, which cover the main traveler’s language to Japan.
By sending questions and requests in the customer’s native language, the chat system will automatically translate the content and correctly understand the content of the customer’s request to respond.
TradFit’s services, such as “concierge applications” and “chat concierge system” for tourist and lodging facilities that are used with multilingual voice agent terminals with images Also, “management screens for lodging facilities” can seamlessly connect them to streamline operations such as orders from tourists and guidance services. This will solve the shortage of workforce and multilingual support for lodging facilities. In addition, our solutions are not only enhancing the hospitality and user satisfaction, but also creating business opportunities, increasing revenues, and reducing cost for accommodation facilities
How TradFit stays ahead of the competition, and what sets it apart?
TradFit has built dominance through the acquisition of several patents for business, development, data volumes, and other core areas. By accumulating large volumes of data, they have rapidly improved their services and quickly undertaken intellectual property strategies, earning them a dominant position that makes it difficult for other companies to gain access.
As Japan’s working population decreases, its ability to provide services operated naturally by voice has led to inquiries, not just from the accommodation and tourism industry, but also from many other industries. Looking abroad, people in countries with low literacy rates can still access information and enjoy services, helping to alleviate inequalities and disparities in the world. Their services can contribute to solving social issues made apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the same time, TradFit recognizes that it is difficult for them alone to deal with these high-impact social issues. This is why as a business entity they emphasize the concept of ‘people, karma, and fate.’
On top of this, TradFit has multiple patents already, which are related to voice assistant devices including all AI speaker devices and so on, and also the patents cover all the main systems that hotels use in Japan and other Asian countries. The patents include smart travel, smart room control, automatic robot transportation, and multilingual chatbots, all named after their core function. One of TradFit’s proprietary offerings is the Smart Travel technology, which is designed for avid travelers and provides information on restaurants, tourist attractions, or activities as per user preferences.
Another key patent is the Smart Room Control technology that allows travelers to optimize room temperature and lighting by accepting requests from AI speakers. These patents cover all the central systems that hotels in Japan, other Asian countries, the EU, and the U.S use. By having those patents, other competitors cannot provide the services with any similarity to AI speaker and other voice assistant devices because they have those patents covering on various industries as a BtoB vertical SaaS service.
New Additions to TradFit’s service and solutions?
TradFit’s service and integrated solutions have successfully solved pain points and continuously created values for the accommodation, tourism, hospitality, and many other industries.
They also have plans to contribute and extend to the following domains and industries in various countries:
- Developing services as a B to B to C Vertical SaaS centered on the tourism and lodging industry: COVID-19 countermeasure, contactless, non-personal, manpower saving while protecting jobs, remotely possible. Expand to industries where DX will rapidly advance in the future due to labor intensity, labor shortages, and dependence on subsidies, and where horizontal expansion across countries and industries is possible through Vertical SaaS.
- Solving issues in various labor-intensive industries with our services and collaborative (co-creation) partners: Solving labor-intensive issues such as labor shortages, high turnover, and difficulties in multilingual support, together with our original services and collaborative (co-creation) partners who have strengths in technology and customer channels.
- Expansion into healthcare, Fintech, MaaS, and smart cities, which are social infrastructures: Expansion into healthcare, various financial institutions, MaaS (cars and logistics), and smart cities, which are social infrastructures, such as hospitals and nursing care.
- With the momentum of being adopted by Google for Startups and Microsoft for Startups and continuing the collaboration with major companies, TradFit accelerates the expansion to WEB3.0 areas such as Blockchain, Fintech, NFT, DAO, and Metaverse in existing business and new business in the near future. Further rolling the deeper product and services that integrate Vertical SaaS and Fintech.
- The company’s service is achieving powerful growth and hence, it is planning to capture a large share of the Japanese market and expand to markets in other Asian countries, including the EU, and the U.S. With influential patents and collaboration with major domestic and foreign companies, TradFit’s service and solutions hold the potential to solve the challenges in multiple industries and continue to provide innovative solutions that create value for all.
The Reins at TradFit
For a company like TradFit, that is outwardly towards enabling people, society, and us, consumers. It takes a great and expert team, dedicated to providing exemplary services, and living up to the company’s vision and core values.
More than that it requires a leader who can effectively channel the team’s true potential, and lead them, and the company, in the right direction. TradFit is lucky to have a great leader, a charismatic personality, an innovator, and a motivator commanding the reins.
Yoshiki Toda is the Founder & CEO of TradFit.
Yoshiki Toda graduated from Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, in Japan. Before founding the company, he worked at Nomura Securities Co. After working in asset consulting services for individuals and corporate high-net-worth individuals at the head office in Osaka, and in the investment banking division in Osaka, including domestic and overseas M&A for listed companies, associate work in finance and branch planning, he was transferred to the Group Public Relations Department of Nomura Holdings, Inc.
After working on public relations for the entire Nomura Group for both domestic and international media, he was assigned to the Investment Banking Division of Nomura Securities Co., Ltd. for the Vice President position as IPO RM banker mainly in the TMT（Telecom, Media, Technology）, Industrials, Material, and Renewable energy sector.
He was also working in the same department as global investment banking strategic planning. He has a wide range of experience from programming for front-end and server-side, DB, API, cyber security, etc. He is well versed in both development and business domains, including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. He is also familiar with the essence of successes and failures of a wide range of domestic and international technologies and startups from his previous work experience.
Here are some of the key achievements that Toda and his company TradFit have been honored with:
- Received the 3rd “IP BASE AWARD” Encouragement Award (Startup Category) from the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry and the Japan Patent Office.
- No. 1 in 6 items in accommodation facility support tools according to a survey by the largest Japanese trend research
- No. 1 in 3 categories in a survey by a major Japanese consumer research
- One of the “Top 50 Innovative Companies to watch in 2022” by The CEO Views
- One of the “10 Ethical Companies of the Year 2022” by The Silicon Review
- One of the “Top 10 Cognitive Solution Providers 2021” by APAC CIO outlook
- Selected as one of the 100 Featured Companies in Asia for 3 consecutive years
- Selected as one of the 100 Best Ventures for 3 consecutive years
- Selected as one of the largest ILS (INNOVATION LEADERS SUMMIT) in Asia for 3 consecutive years
Team of TradFit
The management team and core members have excellent experiences and achievements in business, marketing, UX design, creativity, development, finance, and management that complement each other and form a fully functional team.
“In TradFit’s inspiring and creative company culture, engineers are encouraged to handle cutting-edge technologies such as voice interfaces, natural language understanding solutions, human-computer interaction technologies, and more to make SaaS products of excellence.”
TradFit’s multicultural flat international team with diverse backgrounds promoting a diverse culture prevents them from one-sided views. TradFit has continually rolled out better services and business insights by analyzing various big data using machine learning and artificial intelligence.
