Dating app to help company staff find a match at work gets backing of Japanese firms amid the pandemic

With the coronavirus pandemic reducing chances for people to meet in person, a large number of companies in Japan have turned to an AI-powered dating app to help their employees find love, and hopefully become happier and more productive workers as a result.

In all, about 800 firms and organisations across the country have signed up to the app called Aill goen, partly attracted by the fact that the pool of potential matches is limited to employees of the participating companies – thus providing “a secure and safe platform”, according to the developers of the service.

“My goal was to create a platform that would make it easier for employees to achieve a work-life balance and in turn boost the company’s growth as well,” said China Toyoshima, chief executive of Aill Inc, the Tokyo-based start-up that launched the service in November 2020.

“Employers were worried about the mental health of their workers, who were largely staying at home with almost no physical interaction during the pandemic,” she said, referring to the widespread trend of teleworking.

The firms to have signed up so far include big-name companies such as Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Mizuho Securities, All Nippon Airways and The Mainichi Newspapers.

The service is being provided as part of the package of welfare and benefits programmes that many Japanese firms offer their employees, which already in some cases included financial support for workers who use marriage agencies.

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But for employees, Aill goen is a much cheaper option. It costs 6,000 yen (US$52) per month, with some companies shouldering all or part of the monthly fee.

The services of conventional marriage agencies, in contrast, cost roughly double that, along with hefty admission fees running sometimes into hundreds of thousands of yen that individuals may need to shoulder themselves.

While there are dating apps across the world with AI-assisted features, such as figuring out users’ preferences regarding a partner’s appearance, Aill goen’s approach is to focus on intervening during initial text chats, suggesting when someone should ask for a date and what questions to ask to facilitate conversations – the kind of advice one might expect from a best friend.

For example, the AI engine might “coax a man to ask a woman out on a movie date or suggest he wait a while to ask if it judges that it’s too soon to make a move”, said Toyoshima.

The AI assists only when it determines the pair’s conversation has hit a standstill and its “intervention is required to ease the situation”, she said.

As of December, 76 per cent of active users who had utilised the app’s AI support were able to arrange dates, according to a survey by the start-up.

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Toyoshima, 36, said she came up with the idea of developing the service in 2018 after becoming a candidate for an executive-level position while working at a major Japanese pharmaceutical company.

Acknowledging that the professionals who were her target users had little time to spare meant it was important to maximise the chances of success. To avoid “heartbreaks and rejections”, it was necessary to turn to AI.

This led her to Hidenori Kawamura, a professor at Hokkaido University in northern Japan, who with two other researchers developed the AI for two years through deep learning and machine learning, among other methodologies.

The result was an app whose features also include a pair compatibility chart, as well as a bar displaying how much a potential partner appears to like a user based on how text chats are going.

The online matchmaking market in Japan nearly quadrupled in size between 2016 and 2020 and is expected to continue to grow rapidly.