Lawson

Lawson, Inc. is a Japanese convenience-store company, established on April 15, 1975 and headquartered in Osaki, Shinagawa, Tokyo, whose business is franchising Lawson convenience stores. At the end of February 2026 its group operated 14,697 stores in Japan, across all 47 prefectures, and also had stores in China, Indonesia, Hawaii, Thailand and the Philippines; it reported 12,087 consolidated employees and chain-wide store sales of ¥3.0223 trillion.¹

Its main AI-at-work case is avatar customer service. On September 22, 2022 Lawson announced a partnership with AVITA, the avatar company led by Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, and began recruiting 10 to 30 “avatar workers” to serve customers remotely at a new “Green Lawson” store in Tokyo from the end of November 2022; it aimed to train 50 certified avatar operators for 10 stores in Tokyo and Osaka during fiscal 2023, and 1,000 nationwide during fiscal 2025.² By September 2024 avatar staff were in 14 stores in six prefectures, and Lawson had trialed a “Lawson Avatar Store” in February 2023, where producers of traditional crafts appeared as avatars to explain their goods. In September 2024 it also opened Lawson JAM BASE in Grand Green Osaka with AVITA, where an AI-driven avatar in the eat-in corner reads customers’ behavior and reacts with speech.³

Ryutsuu News reported in July 2026 that the trial covered 78 stores in regions including Tohoku, Kanto, Kinki and Shikoku, with about 70 remote operators, one of them working from Sweden, and was extending to three Sapporo stores from July 11. One operator can serve several stores at once, guiding shoppers and explaining the self-checkouts, which frees store staff for in-store cooking and shelf work. Lawson credits the avatars with a rise in self-checkout use of 15% or more and about 1.5 hours or more less register work per store on average, and some stores are testing avatars that serve customers in several languages.⁴ Because a person voices most of these avatars, MetaRoles counts them as remote human work rather than AI in AI in-store sales assistants and AI and robot receptionists; the JAM BASE avatar is the AI-driven exception.