Krafton said on Tuesday it will jointly hold a hackathon with CJ Olive Young to find artificial intelligence (AI) talent that can address inefficiencies in real-world work settings.

The companies will hold the event, titled "Kopathon: AI Native Battleground", on July 30 at PUBG Seongsu in Seongsu-dong, Seoul. Applications will be accepted through July 17. Applicants may include people with experience using AI, job seekers preparing for developer roles and junior developers, as well as non-developers with tool-usage skills. Winners will receive 10 million won in total prize money and benefits including passing the document-screening stage for Krafton's forward-deployed engineer (FDE) roles and CJ Olive Young's AI engineer roles.

The hackathon will be run based on Krafton's in-house AI-native hiring and evaluation solution, "Kopa-Probe". Participants will complete a Krafton task that involves solving problems by interacting with a virtual on-the-job manager, and a CJ Olive Young task that tackles distribution-site issues combining customers, products and data.

Kopa-Probe evaluates participants' overall capabilities by structuring not only outputs but also processes such as problem definition, AI use, iterative improvement and result verification. The event will also feature networking sessions, including talks by incumbent workers and a panel discussion involving human resources staff from both companies.

Park Jae-min (박재민), head of Krafton's AI Frontier division, said, "Talent evaluation in the AI era must be able to see the entire process of defining and solving problems using AI and verifying results." He added, "This hackathon will be a stage for participants to prove their capabilities and an opportunity for companies to confirm a new standard for evaluating talent."

Kim Hwan (김환), chief technology officer (CTO) at CJ Olive Young, said, "In challenge tasks similar to the actual work environment, you must be able to prove your capabilities using AI." He added, "As we accelerate expansion into a global omnichannel platform, we will make securing AI-native talent a key driving force and, together with our members, deliver the best AI transformation (AX) services to customers."