Krafton Will Be An “AI First” Company Going Forward, According to CEO

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 23, 2025 | 1:11pm

Video Games News subnautica 2

Krafton Will Be An “AI First” Company Going Forward, According to CEO

Krafton, the publisher behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, Inzoi, and Subnautica 2, announced in a press release today that it’s going to be an “AI First” company going forward.

CEO Kim Chang-han stated that effective immediately, the company will utilize AI as a “central and primary means of problem-solving” (translation from Google Translate), and that they would “leap forward as a company that promotes the growth of members and expands the organization’s areas of challenge through AI.” The company plans on using AI for “workflow automation,” “in-game AI services,” and is even reorganizing its HR teams around AI.

The press release describes that “‘AI First’ is a strategy that prioritizes AI as a central and primary means of problem-solving, fostering change in individuals and organizations, increasing company-wide productivity, and accelerating mid- to long-term corporate value growth. Based on agentic AI, Krafton plans to expand the scope of individual roles and organizational challenges to secure future growth engines.”

For those who’ve never heard of agentic AI, it is (allegedly) different from generative AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT in that it is meant to accomplish goals “with limited supervision,” according to a description from IBM. Krafton’s own definition provided in the press release is “AI that establishes goals and plans and executes complex task automation by linking with external tools.”

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To achieve this, the company is going to spend 100 billion won (approximately $69,585,550) to build infrastructure, which will “pursue AI workflow automation, as well as strengthen AI R&D and in-game AI services.” They also claim that “by the second half of 2026, the company plans to complete its AI platform and data integration/automation foundation, establishing a company-wide AI operation infrastructure that includes an AI-linked workflow, an agentic AI management platform, and a data standardization system.” Ostensibly, the company plans to not only utilize AI for problem-solving and in-game services, but also to invest tens of millions into AI infrastructure that will allegedly help them pursue these goals.

On top of this, the company is going to spend 30 million won (approximately $20,900,825) to “support its employees in directly utilizing and applying various AI tools to their work.” They will establish an “AI Learning Hub” to train employees alongside “AI Hackathons.”

The move comes amid growing concerns that we’re potentially in the middle of an AI bubble driven by vastly overly optimistic investments that would tank the stock market if they were to pop. Generative AI models have quickly churned through massive chunks of the internet, with concerns that companies like OpenAI will have gone through all publicly available data as early as next year.

Meanwhile, Krafton has been in the middle of a messy legal battle with the former lead developers of Subnautica 2, whom they ousted; Krafton said that the founders “abandoned their posts” and “deceived” the company, while the former leads said that Krafton delayed Subnautica 2 to avoid paying employees a $250 million earnout bonus for meeting its revenue targets.