Naver has declared that it will put AI agents into every one of its service areas within this year. The announcement came at the 27th annual general meeting of shareholders held on the 23rd at Green Factory in Bundang-gu, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. An agent is software that handles intermediate steps such as searching, comparing and ordering once a user states only the goal. It means that the act of typing a word into a search box and scanning the results will itself change.
The announcement is an extension of the company's "On-Service AI" strategy. In this third year since the strategy was declared, the company said it will go beyond adding a few features and shift the way its services operate overall toward agents. The plan is to upgrade vertical agents for each area, including search, shopping, finance and health, in sequence. Vertical refers to an agent narrowly specialized by field.
Shopping moved first. Naver introduced an AI shopping agent in February, and plans to widen the scope of application across shopping categories within the year. The initial rollout was a beta centered on the digital, living and lifestyle categories. No user response or transaction figures since the introduction were disclosed that day.
The health field is also on the schedule for this year. The company said it will unveil a health agent and raise its performance using data from Seoul National University Hospital. Because the service handles medical information, how the contractual form of the data use and the legal basis for processing the information are settled becomes the key to an actual launch. Nothing has been confirmed on this point.
The services facing outward are not the only thing changing. Naver has set a goal of using AI to roughly double productivity across all job functions, including development, planning, design and research. It means halving the time that went into a single project. How this goal will be measured, how many people it covers and how staffing will be managed were not explained that day.
The revenue model is being reworked as well. The policy, as understood, is to monetize the shopping and Place agents by applying business models such as advertising. On top of that, the company said it will complete a "full-loop platform" connecting online experience through to offline visits, purchases and use, and decided to increase investment in logistics and points of contact. In areas with heavy security requirements such as the public sector, finance and defense, it will push sovereign AI to grow its business for corporate clients.
The same shift is under way outside the country. Salesforce's agent service "Agentforce" is known to have annual recurring revenue of about $800 million (about 1.1886 trillion won) and about 30,000 contracts. The company is moving from charging by number of users to charging based on the volume of work handled by AI. Chief Executive Marc Benioff said at the February earnings announcement that AI does not replace the software subscription business but rather strengthens its competitiveness.
As the technology spreads, problems of control follow. In a survey of about 1,000 IT staff by the market research firm Gravity, 90% said they had experienced security problems in agent environments, and only about one in five had a systematic control framework in place. That is because the moment accounts and permissions are given to software instead of people, it becomes difficult to trace who executed what.
Okta formally launched an identity management product dedicated to agents on April 30, and SailPoint, CyberArk and Microsoft have also released related products one after another. In Korea, Raonsecure is developing management technology using decentralized identity authentication.
The mood at the shareholders' meeting was not as bright as the technology plans. One shareholder said the return on stock bought five years ago was minus 36%, and demanded that the dividend per share be raised from 2,630 won to 3,000 won and that the ceiling on directors' remuneration be frozen. Chief Executive Choi Soo-yeon said it was difficult to promise specific figures, and mentioned strengthening shareholder returns including buying back and cancelling treasury shares. All five agenda items put to the meeting passed, and Chief Financial Officer Kim Hee-cheol was newly appointed as an inside director.
Once agents take hold, users will move toward stating conditions and receiving results rather than scrolling through product listings. Merchants' concern shifts from search exposure to how agents read their products, and inside the company the boundary of the repetitive work people used to do is drawn again. Since a deadline of within the year has been set, the expansion of shopping categories and the launch of the health agent become the first test of that change. The expansion into finance and Web3 through the acquisition of Dunamu is still going through licensing procedures, so Naver's report card for this year looks set to be graded on both the technology schedule and the regulatory schedule.
