Naver, Kakao gear up for agentic AI era in 2026

After spending last year overhauling their artificial intelligence (AI) business, Korea's two internet giants, Naver and Kakao, are now accelerating their push toward redefining their flagship search and messaging services through agentic AI. Both companies spent 2025 strengthening the application of their AI technologies, embedding large language models (LLMs) across their ecosystems to improve user engagement in their existing services. Building on these foundations, they are now positioning their AI systems to operate proactively as agentic AI, which can understand user intent, plan actions by itself and execute tasks without direct prompts from users. In November, Naver unveiled Agent N, a personalized and integrated AI agent, as its core AI strategy to leverage the company’s vast data and translate it into real actions within Naver services. It is designed to seamlessly connect Naver’s services from search and maps to calendar, reservations and content. “Users will no longer need to worry about which words to type for search. Instead, simply by conversing with Agent N, the AI