NHN said on March 30 it held an in-house programme called the AI Sprintathon on March 25-26 to improve artificial intelligence skills among employees across its group.

Sprintathon is a portmanteau of sprint, meaning a full-speed dash, and hackathon. Employees across the NHN group took part in teams of 3. Team members including planners, developers and designers worked together to produce AI-based results in a short time.

A total of 15 teams advanced to the finals and showcased projects across 2 tracks: new development (games, services) and work productivity. In the new development track, entries included an AI deduction courtroom drama, a character-raising game, AI-based travel storytelling and a business-to-business (B2B) company dinner matching platform.

In the work productivity track, entries included an NHN Dooray-based customer service (CS) agent, an NHN Cloud integrated resource dashboard, a brand-naming support tool, an AI image factory and a work-focused briefing service. They competed for total prize money of 30 million won. On the second day of the event, March 26, teams submitted final outputs, pitched and underwent judging. The entire process was livestreamed internally on YouTube through 'AI Sprintathon Day Live'.

Jeong Woo-jin (정우진), CEO of NHN, served as a keynote speaker on the first day of the event. "Rather than the results, I hope you focus on the experience of deriving the intended output with AI help," he said. "As 2026 will be a time when major transformation takes place across work and organisational culture, let NHN take the lead and be reborn as an 'AI-first' company that embraces AI," he said.

NHN opened its in-house office AI platform 'Playground' in South Korea and Japan late last year to drive AI-based work innovation among employees. It is also running an in-house AI education programme called 'AI School', setting up an in-house 'AI Technology Council' and operating an awards programme for best practices in AI use. NHN plans to continue expanding various AI education programmes in 2026.