Krafton announced the creation of a new position, Chief AI Officer (CAIO), and the appointment of Lee Kang-wook, Head of AI Division, to the position. The CAIO will oversee the company's AI research and development and mid- to long-term technology strategy.
The company explained that this appointment was made after comprehensively considering the new CAIO's accumulated research achievements in the AI field, project management experience, and organizational leadership.
Kangwook Lee, the newly appointed CAIO, received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2016 and has been a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 2019. Since 2022, he has concurrently served as the Head of Krafton's AI Division, continuing his work across both academia and industry. Within the company, he has led research and development in core AI areas such as machine learning, language models, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and multimodal models. He has also accumulated research achievements, with 57 papers accepted at international conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.
A key project is the Co-Playable Character (CPC), a real-time interaction between users and AI, which was unveiled in 2025 in collaboration with NVIDIA. He also participated in the independent AI Foundation Model project, leading its technological development. He recently resigned from his tenured professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to focus on the company's AI research and development and mid- to long-term strategy.
The company plans to use this appointment as an opportunity to enhance its game AI research and development system and strengthen its mid- to long-term business strategy based on its core technologies. This AI strategy will be driven by three pillars: ▲innovating the user experience, ▲improving production and operational efficiency, and ▲securing new mid- to long-term growth engines.
In the area of user experience innovation, we plan to advance AI technology applicable to games and enhance the completeness of AI-based interactive content, such as CPC. Each studio will selectively utilize features tailored to the specifics of their project, building on a common AI foundation.
In the area of improving production and operational efficiency, we plan to strengthen data analysis and production support technologies, and leverage user data during the operational phase to improve service quality and stability. This will create an environment where developers can focus on their creative work.
In the mid- to long-term new business area, physical AI and robotics research will be pursued through a separate corporation. The corporation, named "Ludo Robotics," will have a parent company in the United States and a subsidiary in Korea. The Korean corporation will be led by Kang-wook Lee, CAIO. The company believes that the large-scale interaction data and virtual environment management experience accumulated during game development and operation will be utilized in physical AI and robotics research.
Kang-wook Lee, CAIO, sees AI as a tool to expand creativity, not as a technology that replaces creation, and announced that he will explore the possibilities of technology and data-based expansion, focusing on the gaming business.
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