South Korea's Kakao bets big on OpenAI partnership to win AI race

Just the day before the glad-handing event with Chung, Altman was in Tokyo with SoftBank’s billionaire founder Masayoshi Son, announcing a new joint venture to market AI services to Japanese companies. SoftBank recently led a $40 billion funding round in OpenAI and the two companies are also partners in the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI data centres in the US. 

It’s a critical turning point for Kakao. The company’s business is dependent on the Korean market—compared with blue-chip stalwarts like Samsung and Hyundai whose fortunes are determined by global exports—which faces a deepening economic slump. The country’s GDP contracted by 0.2 percent in the first quarter amid the threat of a global trade war, weak consumer spending and months of political turmoil. 

In 2024, the company narrowed its net loss to 161.9 billion won ($119.4 million) from 1.82 trillion won the previous year, on a 4 percent uptick in revenue to 7.87 trillion won. The alliance with OpenAI could yield as much as double-digit sales growth within two years, according to Kakao as it transforms itself into a company where AI is at the core of its operations and services.

Shina Chung and Sam Altman are hoping for a win-win Image: Courtesy of Kakao Corp.

Chung will need to act fast to hard-bake the fast-evolving tech into Kakao’s businesses, which run the gamut of everyday activities, from messaging and online banking to music streaming and taxi-hailing, to gain an edge on its chief rival Naver, South Korea’s biggest internet company by revenue (2024: 10.73 trillion won). The Seongnam-based firm is widely seen as being a step ahead of Kakao in the AI race with its large language model (LLM) HyperClova X, launched in 2023 and tailored for the Korean language and culture. Also closing in is a fast-growing crop of local AI native startups. 

 Already, Chung has begun laying the foundation. In mid-June, the company announced a 600-billion-won investment to build a 92,000-square-meter AI data centre in Namyangju city, about 25 kilometres from Seoul. The data centre—its second after last year’s launch of a facility in Ansan with 6 billion gigabytes of data storage capacity—will break ground in 2026 and is slated to open by 2029. 

Also read: OpenAI launches ChatGPT-5 amid intensifying AI competition

By leveraging OpenAI’s LLMs, which undergird ChatGPT, Kakao is developing a suite of services with the aim of getting users to increase their time on the superapp—and spend more money while using it. “We saw diminishing returns trying to compete in the benchmark tests for the most powerful AI models, so we decided on a more practical approach seeking cost efficiency,” says Chung.

 OpenAI-powered AI agents have the potential to autonomously plan and take action across Kakao’s digital ecosystem, with limited human direction; for example, make a restaurant booking on behalf of a KakaoTalk user, add a calendar reminder, book a taxi and pay for a meal. That stickiness, Chung believes, will result in more ads—one of Kakao’s main revenue drivers—reaching users across its chats and channels. “AI enhances our core business, especially advertising and commerce,” she says. 

Advertising accounted for 15 percent of group revenue last year while its commerce unit contributed 11 percent. Kakao earns commissions of up to 8 percent per transaction for gifts sent between KakaoTalk users. An average of 600,000 gifts (from chocolate to vitamins to cosmetics and clothes) are exchanged daily, the company says, in the form of mobile vouchers that can be redeemed at participating restaurants and retailers or ordered from the platform’s gift shop. 

(Clockwise from left) A Kakao Friends store selling character merchandise such as Ryan (the lion) and the radish-in-rabbit clothing Muzi; Kakao Pay is accepted at stores throughout South Korea; a taxi operated by Korea Mobility Image: Kakao friends, Getty Images; Bloombergv

“The advertising business, which currently operates as the main cash cow of internet companies, will undergo dynamic changes with the introduction of AI-based services,” says Jingu Kim, a Seoul-based analyst at Kiwoom Securities. He predicts there will be a rapid uptake in B2C-based subscription plans that include AI agent services. “In this process, we expect Kakao will be able to secure sustainable growth and level up its corporate value through its collaboration with OpenAI.” 

 In a dry run with OpenAI’s tech in early May, Kakao launched a new standalone messaging app called Kanana for closed beta testing that features AI agents Kana and Nana. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT and its own small language model (SLM), it can assist users in personal and group chats by answering questions, summarising group conversations, setting meeting times for events and sharing updates. Kakao declined to say how much it has spent but discloses that some 400 employees, or about 10 percent of its workforce, are working on AI projects.

“For everyday-use cases, we don’t need to [invest in] a large language model,” says Chung, as that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to develop. Besides being cheaper to train and run, SLMs are safer to use as they’re less likely to provide incorrect answers to user queries, known as hallucinations, while also being more secure, she adds. It doesn’t require a network connection to a cloud, which is vulnerable to server breaches.

Kakao will use its SLM to perform simple tasks, while relying on OpenAI’s powerful LLM to manage more complex, multistep and linked applications across Kakao’s ecosystem, says Chung. It’s the same strategy used by Apple: Simple queries are answered by Siri, powered by Apple’s in-house Apple Intelligence LLM, and more complex questions are directed to ChatGPT. “Everyone was defaulting to GPUs for AI, but does it make sense to use the most expensive chips for small inference tasks?” explains Chung.

The company expects to complete Kanana’s closed beta testing in November, around the same time that it plans to launch the OpenAI-Kakao AI agent. “The virtual assistant will automatically do the work for you and life will be so much better even without knowing what AI is,” says Chung. “Because now you need to find which app to use, go to the app, take action. With agentic AI it will be seamless.”

Alongside her tech focus, Chung has been striving to make Kakao leaner. This has involved shedding non-core businesses—the number of affiliates has dropped by a fifth over the past two years to 115 from 147, the company says. Then there’s the planned spin-off of Daum, the country’s second-largest portal site by daily visitors, which Kakao acquired in 2014. This will allow Chung to concentrate on juicing up other parts of Kakao’s portfolio, both domestic and overseas, and in particular its banking, entertainment and digital healthcare services.

 In June, a joint venture between its internet banking arm Kakao Bank and Thai financial group SCBX, which controls Siam Commercial Bank, received approval from the Thai government to establish a virtual bank in Thailand, making it the first Korean bank to operate in the country in 25 years. Earlier this year, Kakao Entertainment announced the global launch of its fan-community app Berriz as Kakao Healthcare forged a partnership with Seoul-based elderly-care startup Caring and expanded into Japan.

Kakao’s sales started to lose steam after peaking at 2 trillion won in the third quarter of 2023. With the company being under pressure to boost revenue and earnings, founder Kim Beom-su embarked on an aggressive expansion of its entertainment portfolio. Kim, who has a 24 percent stake in Kakao and a net worth of $5.1 billion, made the fate­ful call to get into a bidding war for K-pop agency SM Entertainment with Korean billionaire Bang Si-hyuk’s Hybe, manager of boy band sensation BTS. 

 While Kakao was ultimately successful, snatching a 35 percent stake in SM for 1.3 trillion won in March 2023, prosecutors alleged that Kim, long-hailed as an internet pioneer, had manipulated SM’s stock price to ward off Hybe. Kim, who denied any wrongdoing, was arrested in July 2024 and is currently out on bail awaiting trial. In a statement to Kakao employees at the time, he said: “The allegations are not true. I have never instructed or condoned any illegal acts.”

 During the takeover battle for SM, Chung was running venture capital arm Kakao Ventures and also had a board seat at Kakao. She had made a name for herself as a VC investor with a portfolio that produced four unicorns. To steady the ship, Kakao’s board enlisted Chung as CEO last year. “I saw that period as a turning point for Kakao,” she recalls, adding that a crisis “can be an opportunity for renewal.”

Chung’s forward-looking approach was honed over a 25-year career that has included roles at Boston Consulting Group, eBay and Kakao rival Naver. She studied French literature at Yonsei University in Seoul (not because she liked it but because, back then, it was the subject du jour among brainy female students), followed by a master’s degree in marketing from the same college and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

In 2014, she joined Kakao Ventures as a partner, becoming its CEO four years later. Her decade-long stint at the VC arm taught her how to deploy “my imagination with curiosity”, she says. “For example, the market for most early-stage investments wasn’t there yet, so I needed to imagine it.” She did just that with Kakao Ventures’ early backing of South Korean AI chipmaker Rebellions, contributing 2 billion won of the 5.5 billion won in seed funding in 2020. Last December, Rebellions became the country’s first AI chip unicorn, valued at 1.3 trillion won, equivalent to $1 billion at the time, after it merged with a rival chipmaker owned by Korean billionaire Chey Tae-won’s SK Group (Kakao retains a stake).

It’s not a given that Chung’s big tech bet will pay off. There are concerns in the industry that AI agents are more hype than substance, and could struggle to gain traction with users, much like Facebook’s metaverse, which saw the social media giant rebrand itself Meta and pour tens of billions of dollars into a virtual world project that has so far flopped. Alongside OpenAI, tech firms Google, Anthropic and Salesforce have debuted AI agents for consumers and businesses but they are nowhere near mainstream. 

OpenAI is also restricted in its use of personal data collected from Kanana agents, per a government review requested by Kakao over concerns about sharing personal information such as bank account and credit card details. Chat data must be stored in a database controlled by Kakao and can’t be used by OpenAI for commercial purposes, the Personal Information Protection Commission ruled.

For now, a campaign promise by South Korea’s new president Lee Jae-myung to invest 100 trillion won in AI and introduce measures to support the country’s internet giants has led Kakao’s previously moribund shares to surge over 85 percent in the past two months. Investors also piled in over a proposed law that would allow companies in South Korea to issue won stablecoins, with Kakao’s listed payments platform Kakao Pay seen as one of the main beneficiaries. Kakao Pay shares rocketed before correcting sharply recently after regulators highlighted the risks associated with stablecoins.

Chung’s shown the stamina and smarts to meet such challenges and has a secret weapon up her sleeve: Imagination. “It will work very well,” she says. “Especially when new eras come.”