Kakao Attaches Hyper-Personalized AI Across Talk, Shopping, and Maps

Jeong Sinaa Announces at Earnings Call
Goal to Increase KakaoTalk User Dwell Time by 20%
Revenue Reaches 7.8 Trillion KRW, Operating Profit at 491.5 Billion KRW

Jung Sin-ah, CEO of Kakao (left), and Sam Altman, CEO and founder of OpenAI, are attending the 'Kakao Media Day' held at the Plaza Hotel in Jung-gu, Seoul on the 4th, posing for a photo. Photo by Kang Jin-hyung

Kakao, which recently announced a collaboration with OpenAI, revealed plans to apply artificial intelligence (AI) technology not only to KakaoTalk but also to its shopping and map services.

On the 13th, during an earnings conference call, Jeong Sin-ah, CEO of Kakao, stated, "We will launch 'AI Mate Shopping' and 'AI Mate Local' as channel forms within KakaoTalk in the first half of the year and will later apply them to commerce pages and KakaoMap." Kakao's 'AI Mate' is a service that utilizes AI to analyze various user requests and recommend appropriate content accordingly.

CEO Jeong projected that through AI Mate Shopping, users will receive personalized product recommendations tailored to their demands, contributing to an increase in commerce transaction volume. AI Mate Local was introduced as a service that recommends various contextually appropriate places based on user requests.

Kakao also announced plans to introduce generative search services across its major business ecosystems. CEO Jeong explained, "Despite Kakao's overwhelming traffic, the search activity itself is not large," adding, "By applying AI to existing shop (#) searches and new services, when users search for information within the Kakao ecosystem, the service will generate content that summarizes and organizes the optimal answers by inferring not only the requested content but also the context."

Regarding the AI agent to be developed in collaboration with OpenAI, he explained, "It will not be limited to simple Q&A but will perform complex hyper-personalized tasks across various services within the Kakao ecosystem." He added, "Since monetization is necessary to sustainably operate the most popular AI service in Korea, we expect it to be a challenging mission. We intend to find the right answers through various attempts."

In particular, CEO Jeong set a goal to increase KakaoTalk user dwell time by more than 20%. By introducing new services combined with AI, he aims to establish a foundation to reignite growth in core businesses.

Meanwhile, Kakao announced that its consolidated operating profit for last year increased by 6.6% to 491.5 billion KRW. Revenue rose by 4.2% year-on-year to 7.8738 trillion KRW. Adjusting for the one-time bad debt write-off from KakaoPay caused by the ‘T-mep incident,’ the annual operating profit amounts to 523 billion KRW, a 13.5% increase compared to the previous year.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.