In what could be SoftBank’s newest trick to make ungodly amounts of money disappear, the Japanese investment firm will pay $3 billion a year to force companies in its portfolio to experiment with AI agents.
SoftBank and OpenAI announced Monday that they were forming a joint venture to develop and market a new product called Cristal Intelligence, which will build off of OpenAI’s latest reasoning models to create AI agents that will complete tasks without human intervention.
SoftBank said in a press release that it plans to automate over 100 million workflows among its companies, which could include generating financial reports, drafting documents, and managing customer inquiries.
“By automating and autonomizing all of its tasks and workflows, SoftBank Corp. will transform its business and services, and create new value,” the company said.
OpenAI has already launched a preview of its agentic tool Operator for its top-tier subscribers, who pay $200 a month and now have the privilege of not clicking buttons to schedule their own haircuts.
The new Cristal Intelligence system will create similar agents, but they’ll be trained on corporate customers’ data and customized for their systems and needs, SoftBank said. At least initially, it will be marketed exclusively to “major companies in Japan.”
SoftBank, led by its Chairman Masayoshi Son, built a strong reputation in the tech venture space with early investments in companies like Uber, DoorDash, and Alibaba. But in recent years, its bets have been notably less successful, particularly when it comes to transforming the nature of work. It lost billions on WeWork, for example, and threw $375 million at now-defunct Zume, which promised to automate and disrupt the creation of pizzas.
The Cristal Intelligence partnership deepens its financial stake in OpenAI. SoftBank is reportedly in talks to invest $25 billion directly into the company and it has already announced a collaboration called Stargate, another joint venture including OpenAI that plans to spend $500 billion over the next four years to build out AI infrastructure like data centers.
The firm’s big money bets come amid a lot of hype about the potential of AI agents, but also as as breakthroughs by the Chinese company DeepSeek have raised questions about whether cheaper, more efficient AI developers will undercut OpenAI, which is losing money on its most expensive subscription plan because of the cost of running the technology.