Back in May, Rakuten held its annual Optimism event in Carlsbad, California. It brought together 1,000 marketers across retail, finance, and travel to network and learn by beautiful West Coast beaches. I, tragically, was unable to attend.
Sessions covered a plethora of themes, ranging from emerging trends, to AI strategies, personalisation, loyalty, and more.
I recently caught up with Adam Rostan, Rakuten Advertising’s SVP Product & Technology, to learn more about the platform’s wider roadmap concerning AI.
Here’s what Rostan had to say:
Sol Wilkinson: You just launched Detect, Storefronts, and Prompt. In simple terms, what do they do for your clients?
Adam Rostan: Detect gives brands the visibility they’ve long needed, identifying programme compliance issues, monitoring affiliate behaviour, and helping partnerships operate at their full potential.
Storefronts empowers creators and influencers to curate products in a way that drives authentic engagement and performance, and also helps streamline the customer experience and path to purchase.
Prompt, our newest reporting tool, applies our AI to simplify ad hoc report requests, surfacing actionable insights on performance, audiences, and trends to help marketers make faster, smarter decisions quickly and in plain language.
SW: Which of the new tools are you personally most excited about, and why?
AR: Detect is a big one for me. Transparency and compliance have been long-standing challenges in affiliate and Detect gives our clients real-time clarity into what’s happening in their programmes, without having to glean large amounts of data to identify patterns manually.
That kind of visibility builds stronger partnerships and gives brands greater confidence to scale. Prompt is also unique in market, as it allows our clients to leverage the power of generative AI, with the confidence that their data does not need to leave the confines of our platform.
SW: What sets Rakuten Advertising’s AI apart from what other platforms are doing right now?
AR: What sets us apart is how deeply our AI is rooted in affiliate expertise. We’re not just applying generic models; we’ve built Affiliate Intelligence to reflect decades of network data, partner behaviours, and performance trends. This is all built on the data flywheel concept, where the continuous collection of insights from our network fuels new cycles of customer value and product iterations.
SW: What went into building this? Did you develop it fully in-house or work with partners?
AR: The majority of this has been built in-house, leveraging our own data assets, technology stack, and affiliate-specific expertise. That control allows us to develop solutions that are purpose-built for the complexity of affiliate marketing, rather than trying to retrofit third-party tools.
We’ve actually been at this a while at Rakuten. Years ago, we started what I would consider our “AI foundation” and structuring our data in a way where it could be easily accessed by AI models. Fast forward to today, and we’re able to action on emerging AI technology to accelerate and scale the more traditional ML approaches of our amazing Data Science and technology teams.
SW: How much can clients trust Detect and Prompt to make appropriate recommendations? Are these tools reliable enough to act on without second-guessing?
AR: Yes — both Detect and Prompt are designed to provide highly actionable recommendations.
Detect was built on years of industry knowledge and behaviours observed in various environments and will only improve over time as customers validate and invalidate our observations, as is the case with the Anomaly detection portion of the Detect suite.
The models we’ve created are continuously validated and fine-tuned to ensure the output reflects actual marketplace dynamics. That means clients can optimise quickly and confidently, knowing that they’re making strategic and intelligent decisions.
SW: What’s coming next? Any developments in the pipeline?
AR: We’re focused on expanding audience-level insights, evolving commissioning recommendation models, and building more automation to drive smarter personalisation at scale – this also includes attribution and MMM.
Affiliate is increasingly becoming a full-funnel channel, and we want to ensure marketers have the flexibility to adapt quickly as consumer behaviour shifts. Longer term, we’re also looking at how affiliate data can better integrate with broader media and measurement ecosystems, bringing even more value to brands' overall marketing strategies.
Our goal is to continue giving marketers more precision and agility, helping affiliate operate as a true full-funnel growth engine.
SW: Do you see AI becoming the core engine of affiliate marketing? How will that change the game for advertisers and affiliates?
AR: Absolutely, but it’s not just affiliate, AI is transforming the digital marketing landscape as a whole. What makes Rakuten unique is that we’ve made deliberate investments to be at the forefront of that change.
AI and large language models (LLMs) go beyond abstract potential — they provide the scalability and automation needed to unlock opportunities that were previously impractical, especially across large, complex networks of bespoke partnerships. With emerging capabilities like agentic reasoning, we're beginning to orchestrate proactive, context-aware decision-making support at scale, reshaping how affiliate programmes are managed and optimised.
We have the largest data science team in the industry dedicated specifically to affiliate marketing, and we've invested heavily in the infrastructure to operationalise AI across our platform. Our models are not generic — they’re purpose-built and trained on affiliate-specific, global use cases, giving Rakuten Advertising a significant uniqueness and leadership in the affiliate marketing industry.
At Rakuten, AI is foundational to our culture. It’s not just a layer of technology — it’s embedded in how we think, how we operate, and how we solve challenges for the affiliate ecosystem. We view AI as a driver of industry transformation, reshaping not only our internal processes but also the way our customers engage with our solutions.
With AI, we’re moving beyond traditional optimisation into real-time intelligence, enabling automated recommendations, proactive campaign management, and dynamic performance tuning at scale. This fundamentally changes how advertisers approach partnerships, measurement, and growth. We’re not simply responding to the AI era — we’re helping lead it.
