KAKEAI adds AI to 1on1 support, doubles monthly fee

KAKEAI's predecessor service, Kakeai, launched in 2020 and has been adopted by more than 600 companies, including Itochu and NTT Data. The company says its AI has analyzed over 3 million cumulative meeting records, giving it a base of past conversations to work from.

The new Kakeai AI 1on1 builds on that base. It serves both general employees and managers: it proposes topics and phrasing before a meeting, summarizes the discussion every 40 seconds during it, and afterward helps review what happened and prepare for the next one. A separate feature analyzes meeting activity across the whole company on a monthly basis. By drawing on meeting content and subsequent employee behavior, the company says the AI can offer advice aimed at raising the effectiveness of each conversation.

The pricing change is a notable part of the rollout. For 20 manager accounts, a company pays 300,000 yen initially and 660,000 yen per month, and the monthly fee is about twice the previous level because of added functions such as visualizing survey results for managers after meetings. The outcome is likely to hinge on whether the AI's advice proves valuable enough for companies to absorb that higher recurring cost, with KAKEAI targeting 100 new adoptions by the end of fiscal 2026.