Weathernews Launches Multilingual AI Agent to Help Businesses Manage Weather Risks

Weathernews Inc. said on August 10 that it has added a chat-based AI agent to "Weathernews for Business," its corporate weather information service, to support operational decision-making in multiple languages. The move targets businesses dealing with weather disruptions occurring simultaneously across Japan, bringing expert-level advice directly to frontline workers.

The Chiba-based weather information provider said the AI agent was developed using know-how built over 40 years of supporting corporate responses to weather risk. According to the company, the system is designed to deliver expert-level guidance immediately to more frontline workers as companies face overlapping weather events.

The agent supports multilingual dialogue, including workplaces with foreign labor. In construction, users can ask when the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) will reach a severe caution level and receive guidance on hydration timing. It can also help retail and distribution operators cut lost sales and food waste during deteriorating weather, help farmers choose suitable timing for pesticide spraying and planting, and help facility managers identify causes of communications failures by extracting lightning-strike histories.

For typhoon response, the agent can be used from the early stage of tropical depression formation and combines Weathernews' own assessments with impact forecasts. Users can ask when a company site will enter areas of strong or storm-force winds, or request information on damage caused by similar past typhoons.

The agent can automatically create response timelines starting one week before an approaching storm and simulate potential business impacts such as power outages and transport disruptions, based on damage patterns from similar past typhoons. It also advises on employee commuting decisions and supports post-event rainfall verification using Weathernews' own observation equipment.

The AI integrates data published by the Japan Meteorological Agency along with Weathernews' proprietary typhoon forecasting models and historical performance data. After a typhoon passes, users can also retrieve observation data from 13,000 locations nationwide through the agent.

Weathernews for Business has been offered since September 2022 as a corporate extension of the company's consumer weather app, used for disaster prevention and business continuity planning, facility management, construction worksite decisions, labor management, and event operations. The platform provides site-specific forecasts and risk data covering rain radar, lightning, power outage risk, typhoon tracks, river water levels, inundation forecasts, evacuation information, and store closure decisions, with a web dashboard that overlays weather information across anywhere from a few sites to several thousand locations.

Japan's summer heat and typhoon season have kept business demand elevated for tools that support workplace safety and operational continuity, and the launch positions Weathernews to serve that demand with multilingual, agent-driven advice. The next thing to watch is how the agent performs through the peak of the current typhoon season and whether the multilingual capabilities help Weathernews win more enterprise customers at home and abroad.