AI Tab to launch in first half, with agents expanding across services by year-end
South Korea's largest internet company told shareholders Monday it will roll out AI agents across major services by year-end, backed by record research spending that topped 2 trillion won ($1.33 billion).
CEO Choi Soo-yeon, speaking at Naver's annual general meeting in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, laid out a concrete timeline: an AI Tab embedded in Naver's search engine will go live in the first half of 2026, while a shopping agent already in beta since February will expand to all commerce categories by December.
Specialized agents for finance, health and local services will follow.
The idea is to evolve user engagement with Naver beyond simply entering a query and leaving. Instead, the platform would handle the entire chain: from search to purchase to booking.
The shopping agent offers an early glimpse of how this works. Rather than returning a list of product links, it holds a conversation. A user who asks for "a sofa for my new apartment; I have a dog" gets recommendations filtered for scratch-resistant materials and living space, with reviews summarized and checkout available in the same thread.
A health agent previewed for the first time at the meeting takes the concept further. A request to "find a clinic for regular blood sugar monitoring" draws on a user's health data to suggest a hospital and complete the reservation.
"The AI Tab goes beyond simple information retrieval to offer practical, context-aware solutions," Choi said, describing the system as a network of "full-loop" agents connecting online queries to real-world actions.
Naver is spending heavily to make this work. The company's annual research and development bill reached 2.22 trillion won in 2025, up roughly 20 percent year on year, according to its report filed with the Financial Supervisory Service. Capital expenditure hit a record 1.32 trillion won, with about 88 percent flowing into data center servers and equipment.
Much of the acceleration traces back to founder Lee Hae-jin, who returned as board chair in March 2025 after a seven-year absence. Under Lee, Naver locked in contracts for 60,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs last October, took delivery of 4,000 B200 chips in January, and signed a computing partnership with AMD last Wednesday. The added firepower will go toward advancing HyperClova X, Naver's in-house large language model.
Naver delivered record results in 2025: revenue of 12.04 trillion won and operating profit of 2.21 trillion won, up 12.1 percent and 11.6 percent respectively. Commerce revenue jumped 26.2 percent to 3.69 trillion won, which helps explain why shopping is the proving ground for the company's first wave of AI agents. R&D as a share of revenue rose to 18.5 percent, still short of the 20 percent target Choi publicly set in late 2024.
mjh@heraldcorp.com
