JapanRetail and e-commerce2026 – ongoingSugi Holdings
Year-end tax adjustment Q&A bot and dispensing drug stock-check agent
Sugi Pharmacy's AI bot handled about 20,000 year-end tax questions, saving HR over 3,000 hours
Problem
HR staff answered a flood of employee questions during the year-end tax adjustment period. Pharmacists also needed a faster way to check whether nearby stores held a dispensing drug.
Approach
Sugi built a RAG chatbot on Amazon Bedrock using the year-end adjustment FAQ. It also built a stock-check agent with Amazon Bedrock Agents that turns plain-language questions into SQL queries on inventory data in Amazon Redshift. The agent took about one month to build and began production rollout in early April 2026.
Results
Takeaway
The HR hours saved were calculated at 10 minutes per inquiry, so the figure is an estimate. The stock agent had no results yet when the post was written.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Retail and e-commerce
- Business function
- Human resourcesProduction and quality
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- Generative AIAI agents
- Adoption
- Off-the-shelf tool or platform
- Evidence
- Vendor case study
Sources
Source summaries
AWS Japan customer story on two generative AI uses at Sugi Pharmacy. It describes a year-end tax Q&A bot and a stock-check agent, and gives about 20,000 inquiries, over 3,000 HR hours saved and availability at 200 stores.
Full details are in the original sources.
