Naver Corp. plans to invest 1 trillion won (approximately $664 million) over the next five years to improve the quality and openness of user content that powers its artificial intelligence (AI) services, a company representative said on Thursday.
Kim Gwan-hyun, Chief Data and Content Officer at Naver, stated that the competitive environment on AI platforms is increasingly shifting toward data quality and service differentiation rather than purely technical capabilities. He emphasized that the company intends to significantly expand its non-technical initiatives aimed at identifying quality content and rewarding creators who make meaningful contributions to its ecosystem.
As part of this strategy, Naver will introduce a new program called 'Naver Mate' next month. The initiative will provide financial incentives to content creators based on how frequently their work is referenced by Naver's AI-powered smart search feature, known as AI Briefing. Under the program, approximately 3,000 selected users each month can receive rewards of up to 10 million won depending on content performance and citation frequency.
Naver stated that its AI Briefing service, launched in March last year, uses generative AI to provide concise answers in search results and currently serves approximately 30 million users per month. The company also emphasized its broader ambitions to enhance the reliability and depth of AI responses by grounding them in trusted, high-quality, human-created content.
Additionally, Naver plans to launch a smart lens feature in June, allowing users to obtain contextual information about physical objects by capturing them with a smartphone camera. This feature is expected to further integrate AI assistance into everyday visual search, expanding the company's ecosystem beyond text search.
Overall, the initiative reflects Naver's broader efforts to build a content-based AI infrastructure, where creators are directly incentivized for contributions to the database that powers generative AI services.