"An era is opening in which artificial intelligence (AI) thinks, plans and acts on its own."
Chung Shin-a, CEO of Kakao, gave a presentation titled "Agentic AI: from possibility to reality" at the SK AI Summit 2025 held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul, on the 3rd.
That day, Chung unveiled Kakao's next-generation AI strategy and emphasized, "In the process of implementing AI in the daily lives of 50 million people, the direction Kakao naturally chose is 'agentic AI.'" Agentic AI refers to an AI system that can recognize goals on its own, observe its environment, plan across multiple steps, take action, and adjust itself according to the results. It means an AI that not only answers questions but also judges for itself what to do and carries it out.
Chung explained, "If existing AI was command-based, performing a single task according to user instructions, agentic AI is autonomous intelligence that sets its own goals, makes plans, and acts flexibly according to context." Chung said, "It repeats a four-stage loop of thinking, remembering, acting and learning to achieve its purpose on its own."
Chung assessed that the evolution of AI toward agentic AI is "a natural step both technologically and commercially." On the technology side, core capabilities such as memory, reasoning and multimodality have advanced rapidly, and on the business side, the essential value of AI is to reduce users' "decision fatigue" and provide personalized experiences.
Chung presented three keywords for the agentic AI that Kakao pursues as "Proactive, Planning and Action." Proactive means an AI that understands the user's situation and context and makes the first suggestion; Planning is the ability for multiple agents to collaborate and design optimal outcomes; Action is the ability to go beyond conversation and complete results through real-world action. Chung said, "These three elements are essential for users to interact naturally with AI and get the results they want." However, Chung pointed out, "The reason agentic AI has not reached the commercialization stage is the limitations of data collection and utilization."
As a solution, Kakao chose On-device AI technology. It runs AI directly on the smartphone without sending users' data to a server. Chung said, "Kakao holds the richest contextual data called 'conversation,' and On-device AI helps securely process data while enabling suggestions for users' next actions in advance."
To that end, Kakao is building an orchestration strategy—combining its in-house models with external AI models and APIs to provide AI features optimized for various services—centered on its self-developed "Kanana Nano 1.3B" model, an MoE (Mixture of Experts) model, and the multimodal "Kanana 2" model that spans images and voice. It has also prepared an agent-dedicated benchmark set consisting of 17 domains such as travel, finance and shopping, and 99 virtual tools.
Chung said, "We are opening up the AI ecosystem through 'Agent Builder,' which allows anyone to easily create their own AI agent, and the tool-integration infrastructure 'Play MCP,'" adding, "Kakao's agentic AI will evolve into 'everyday-life AI' that gives users back their time and simplifies decisions."