Naver will invest 1 trillion won over five years to foster its own content ecosystem to strengthen competitiveness in the artificial intelligence era.

Naver on May 28 held a media roundtable on "Naver's data and content strategy in the AI era" at The Plaza hotel in Seoul.

Attending the event were Chief Data and Content Officer Kim Kwang-hyun (김광현), Content Service Division head Lee Il-gu (이일구) and Search Platform Division head Kim Sang-beom (김상범), who presented strategies to revitalise the creator ecosystem and directions for strengthening AI search services.

Kim Kwang-hyun said that in the AI era, Naver must create gaps in data and service experience in addition to technology. He said Naver's unique content ecosystem built up over more than 25 years is its strongest asset and announced a 1 trillion won investment plan over five years.

As a way to expand the AI ecosystem with creators, Naver will create a new fellowship programme called Naver Mate. It will 공개 about 3,000 top creators each month and provide activity funds totalling 20 billion won, ranging from 300,000 won to 10 million won per person depending on the number of AI briefing citations.

Naver Mate will start in June for creators on Blog, Cafe, Knowledge iN and Premium Content, and it plans to expand the programme in the second half to include Clip creators. It will run the programme as a beta until the end of this year and plans to gradually upgrade support targets and scale in stages.

Lee Il-gu said, "Through the Naver Mate programme, we will explore the direction of important user-generated content in the AI era together with creators, and we will focus on service attempts to revitalise the ecosystem."

Naver is also pushing ahead with service upgrades for an AI integrated agent. It will open its conversational search service AI Tab, which was released in beta in April and surpassed 3 million cumulative users in a month, to all users in June. It will also introduce a new version of Smart Lens at the end of June that lets users take photos with a camera to check information and connect to execution. It also signalled the introduction of a next-generation HyperCLOVA X model.

Kim Sang-beom said, "From June, when AI Tab is officially launched, all Naver users will be able to use conversational search on mobile and PC." He added, "Based on Naver's own assets that best understand the daily lives and context of Korean users, we will implement agentic AI services that connect beyond search to actual execution."