Kakao CI. Photo courtesy of Kakao
Kakao (035720.KS) has chosen food delivery platform Coupang Eats as the first external service to link with its artificial intelligence (AI) agent. The approach handles everything from food recommendations to ordering and payment at once within a KakaoTalk chat room.
Chung Shina, CEO of Kakao, said at a conference call for the company’s second-quarter earnings on the 6th, “The first vertical field to be linked to Kakao’s agent AI is food delivery,” adding, “We are pursuing a partnership with Coupang Eats.” Kakao’s on-device AI model identifies user intent based on conversation context and accumulated user preferences, connecting it to an actual transaction.
Starting with the Coupang Eats collaboration, Kakao plans to expand into vertical areas by linking with various domestic partners going forward. The blueprint is to lay the foundation for transplanting personalized services covering all aspects of daily life—such as commerce, booking, travel and payments—into KakaoTalk. “We will lead the popularization of AI so that every citizen can have their own AI agent,” Chung stressed.
By contrast, the company kept its distance from AI infrastructure businesses such as AI data centers and graphics processing unit (GPU)-based cloud services. “The AI infrastructure business is a field that entails large-scale upfront investment and continuous facility investment, and the expected return on investment (ROI) is not high enough relative to the financial burden,” Chung said. “Kakao will concentrate all its capabilities on the AI services it can do best.”
This “select and focus” stance is also connected to recent earnings trends. Kakao’s second-quarter consolidated revenue was 2.0985 trillion won, and operating profit was 277 billion won. Revenue rose 9% and operating profit rose 36% from a year earlier, marking the best results for the same period. Platform revenue, the mainstay, grew 17% to 1.2303 trillion won, driving overall results. Among these, the combined second-quarter transaction value of TalkBiz commerce, including Gift and Talk Deal, reached 2.7 trillion won, up 9% from a year earlier, leading the growth. This is the backdrop for concentrating resources on business-to-consumer (B2C) AI services that are already delivering results.
Kakao plans to increase AI investment based on the profitability of its platform business. It will also broaden the use of “PlayMCP,” an open platform based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that connects external operators’ data with KakaoTalk’s AI. Through this, the company aims to raise the monthly active users (MAU) of AI services within KakaoTalk to 20 million by year-end.
Where Kakao’s next partner will be is also of interest. Some observers say the Coupang Eats collaboration could broaden the alliance with Coupang across commerce as a whole. The analysis is that a picture in which Kakao uses Coupang’s distribution network and Coupang uses Kakao’s AI technology fits both companies’ interests.
Alliances among platforms are emerging as a survival strategy in the era of AI agents. This is because the convenience of resolving multiple services within a single application has emerged as a key criterion for users’ choices. In the same vein, Naver has broadened external partnerships around its membership program, and global taxi-hailing service Uber acquired the parent company of Baedal Minjok. In particular, as Naver is chasing Coupang by leading with “AI shopping” in the battle for supremacy in the e-commerce market, some observers say an alliance with Kakao is highly likely to materialize.
“This collaboration is significant in that AI technology has penetrated beyond simple shopping into everyday consumption touchpoints such as food delivery orders,” an industry official said. “Expectations for ecosystem expansion across commerce as a whole are growing.”