Mirai Wins 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Award for AI Innovation

Rakuten Advertising’s Mirai has been named “AI-Powered Marketing Decision Engine of the Year” in the 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Awards, a major recognition for innovation in marketing technology. The award highlights how Mirai is reshaping partner and performance marketing with a more intelligent, action-oriented approach to decision-making.

AI in partner marketing is increasingly important as brands look for faster, smarter ways to manage performance marketing. Mirai stands out because it does more than summarize data or suggest next steps. It helps marketers move from goal-setting to execution with greater speed, precision, and confidence.

A Milestone for Rakuten Advertising and Its Clients

The MarTech Breakthrough Awards are widely recognized for honoring innovation across the global marketing, sales, and advertising technology industry. In 2026, the program received thousands of nominations from more than 15 countries, making this win especially meaningful.

Mirai’s MarTech Breakthrough win is more than an industry accolade. It signals a shift in how partner and performance marketing can operate in the AI era. For advertisers, it opens the door to smarter workflows, faster campaign setup, and more strategic optimization.

At a time when marketers are under pressure to drive growth efficiently, award-winning AI marketing technology like Mirai offers a strong example of what the future can look like: intelligent, practical, and built for action.

With Mirai leading the way, the future of partner marketing looks more dynamic than ever.

What Is Mirai?

Mirai is Rakuten Advertising’s agentic AI platform for affiliate and performance marketing. It is built with specialist agents, each designed for a specific part of affiliate program management. Together, these agents surface actionable insights and recommendations that help marketers make better decisions.

Its first agent, “Offers”, focuses on commission offer creation. Instead of manually configuring every detail, marketers describe in natural language what they want to accomplish, such as:

• launching a seasonal promotion
• creating a publisher-specific incentive
• building a category-level commissioning strategy

Offers then translates that input into a configured commission structure, interprets scheduling details, suggests rule priorities, and prepares the offer for review.

How Mirai Goes Beyond Traditional AI Tools

Many AI-powered marketing tools today act as overlays. They summarize reports, surface insights, or provide chatbot-style assistance. Mirai was built to go further.

Our CEO Nick Stamos explains “Mirai was designed from the ground up to serve advertisers in a way generic large language model tools cannot replicate. Rather than functioning as a simple copilot, Mirai acts as a true decision engine.”

The distinction is important as marketers need more than suggestions. They need systems that can:

• reason about objectives
• infer missing context
• recommend complete configurations
• operate within controlled authorization boundaries

Mirai includes human-in-the-loop review before changes are committed, along with role-based access controls and previewable, editable, reversible actions, helping teams move faster while maintaining trust and oversight.

Built for the Future of Affiliate Marketing

Mirai’s recommendations are grounded in real affiliate performance datasets, not just broad, generic AI outputs. Tuned using Rakuten Advertising’s performance data across:

• thousands of brands and publishers
• more than 200 markets
• over two decades of transaction history

As additional specialist agents are introduced, Mirai is expected to expand its reach across advertiser and publisher workflows, creating consistency across dashboards while supporting more scalable decision-making.