[AI Revolution](115) Integrating AI into Daily Life... NHN Advances AI Solution Development

Building AI Lineup Including Fashion, Facial Recognition, OCR, Voice Services, and Chatbots
"Achieving Productivity and Sales Growth in Each Business Through AI"

NHN, which recently repositioned its artificial intelligence (AI) technology organization directly under the CEO at headquarters, is developing and advancing practical AI solutions to realize the motto of "AI in everyday life." The company plans to accelerate the development of specialized generative AI services that can be utilized across various industries, focusing on collaboration with diverse services and businesses within the group.

On the 1st, Lee Rok-gyu, head of NHN AI Technology Lab, told Asia Economy, "We will develop attractive AI services through a flexible approach that secures deep understanding capabilities and highly complete proprietary technologies, while appropriately leveraging available external technologies."

Earlier, NHN reorganized its AI technology business organization (AI Technology Lab) from being part of NHN Cloud to a department directly under the CEO at headquarters. Accordingly, NHN Cloud, the former affiliation, focuses on providing AI infrastructure based on the national AI data center equipped with high-performance computing resources, while the AI technology business organization develops AI services that can be utilized within NHN Group’s businesses.

NHN is building a diverse lineup of AI technologies centered around these organizations, including style transfer, facial recognition, optical character recognition (OCR), voice services, AI fashion, and chatbots (LLM).

Among these, Lee highlighted "AI Fashion" as the most noteworthy AI technology. This technology is applicable to clothing shopping malls and enables searching for similar fashion products based on images or analyzing detailed characteristics of garments. He explained, "It is a strength that AI Fashion is a fashion business-specialized AI technology that is hard to find in the product lineups of typical AI technology companies. AI Fashion is applied to FashionGO, a leading US fashion B2B platform, contributing significantly to business."

As NHN identifies as a game company, it continues to advance AI technology in the gaming field. A representative example is ‘HanDol.’ HanDol was developed in-house based on the vast amount of Go data accumulated since 1999 through NHN’s ‘Hangame Baduk.’ In 2019, it achieved the remarkable feat of reaching the semifinals at the Zhongxin Securities Cup World AI Baduk Tournament and was also chosen as the final opponent for the retirement match of 9-dan Lee Sedol. Lee said, "Currently, HanDol is developed and operated by NHN’s GameAI team, which is responsible for the game AI technology domain. GameAI is developing AI technologies, including HanDol, that provide users with a convenient gaming environment and enhance fun."

NHN’s OCR technology is also noteworthy. OCR is a solution that recognizes text areas and extracts characters from each area. Recognized and detected documents can be databased and utilized or stored in enterprise and institutional workflow automation systems. NHN offers a lineup including Document OCR and Vehicle Plate OCR. Document OCR extracts characters from designated areas within document sources such as business registration certificates, credit cards, and identification cards.

NHN is also pursuing various collaborations to enhance the completeness of these AI technologies. Lee stated, "We communicate with various business entities within the group to develop and provide the AI technologies they need, and we advance existing AI technologies based on feedback from business divisions. We are working closely internally to develop AI technologies with high practicality and completeness tailored to each industry."

They are also considering monetization strategies using the AI technologies developed so far. Lee emphasized, "This year marks the 10th year since NHN began developing AI technologies. Now, we are thinking about ways to integrate AI technologies into various group services to increase productivity and sales in each business. Our goal is to support enhancing profitability across diverse group businesses such as webtoons, games, music (Bugs), collaboration tools (Doorey), cloud, and simple payment (PAYCO)."