On the surface, Capcom and Virgin Voyages have very little in common. The former is a 46-year-old Japanese video game company firmly centered in the virtual world with popular franchises like “Street Fighter” and “Resident Evil.” The latter is a Florida-based cruise line whose business model is physical, centered on a fleet of four ships.
But both find themselves in Las Vegas this week at a developer conference hosted by Google Cloud, where on Wednesday they will separately debut new applications of AI that do have a common theme: guiding the explorer.
At Capcom, AI agents have been deployed to streamline playtesting for new video game development so that engineers and artists can focus less on debugging and more on creating gaming worlds. Virgin, meanwhile, has unveiled a new AI-enabled virtual assistant called Rovey that can help guests book their trips, offer proactive itinerary recommendations, and answer logistic questions.
As games grow bigger, Capcom is turning to AI
Capcom’s AI agents are already operating for over 30,000 hours per month and were built to inspect and pressure-test around half a dozen video game titles before they’re publicly released. “Game teams have become very large, and as these games grow in size and complexity, these game teams find themselves working on very high friction, difficult problems,” says Jack Buser, director of games for Google Cloud.
As these AI agents play through the game, they analyze a checklist of problems that could occur along the way: is the graphics quality failing? Did a crash occur that made the game unplayable? Is there a sense of discomfort as characters move across the field of play? The AI agents aren’t just autonomously detecting and reporting these issues, Capcom says. They are also making suggestions on how to fix them.
“The current game world is as big as one city,” says Kazuki Abe, Capcom’s technical director and head of AI solutions and platform, in an interview conducted with a translator. “There are thousands of characters and tens of thousands of objects, like chairs and desks.” All these variabilities make it difficult for humans to check everything, Abe adds.
For example, visual inspection agents were designed to study when a character changes the equipment they are holding. This simple gesture alone can take 5,280 hours for human playtesters to monitor. AI now screens and flags bugs within those visuals, completing the verification process in about 72 hours. Other agents predict where system issues could occur during the development process. Yet another can assist newer employees, who can ask an AI agent how a veteran engineer would have handled a similar debugging problem in the past.
Over the years, the $200 billion gaming industry has developed more realistic art and graphics and more complex gameplay, resulting in longer and more expensive development cycles for game makers like Capcom. The industry is also facing cyclical challenges. Revenue growth has slowed as consumers spend more time on mobile games. The industry has been beset with layoffs, partly due to consolidation.
Shinichi Inoue, Capcom’s VP of engineering, says agentic AI will help the company train future game designers, artists, and game programmers, a group of employees that the company calls “creators.” “We are using AI to widen the potential of the creators,” Inoue says through a translator. “We are not intending to lower the workforce.”
Virgin’s AI “crew member” aims to shorten sales cycle
Virgin’s Rovey, meanwhile, is the cruise company’s first-ever, external-facing AI tool. Booking a cruise, especially for travelers who haven’t done so before, is a complex process involving navigating various trip itineraries, booking restaurant and entertainment reservations, and off-boat excursions.
“We have to use AI to effectively expedite that process,” says Nathan Rosenberg, Virgin’s chief brand and marketing officer, who says he will closely monitor the satisfaction scores for Rovey, as well as how it influences a guest’s likelihood to recommend Virgin to family and friends.
Rovey’s use case emerged from a small working group of AI “champions,” a cross-functional team that looks at how the crew and sales teams perform their jobs and explores new ways to infuse AI into those workflows. The commercial and marketing teams take a fairly active lead in developing Virgin’s AI playbook.
“If you think about most traditional businesses, they’ll tell you first about what the IT team is doing with vendors, or what the IT team is doing to reduce costs,” says Virgin Voyages CEO Nirmal Saverimuttu. “The front door to AI for us is our growth and marketing teams.”
Rovey was thus developed to support both productivity gains and revenue generation. On the ship, any questions Rovey can answer will lessen the burden for the customer service-focused team members. But Rovey is also designed to help speed up conversation. It typically takes Virgin about six to eight weeks to convert a first-time cruise customer. With Rovey, Saverimuttu hopes to reduce that sales cycle to “two to three weeks.”
John Kell
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