KRAFTON appoints its 1st-ever Chief AI Officer
KRAFTON, the South Korean gaming giant behind PUBG, just picked Kangwook Lee as its first-ever Chief AI Officer.
Lee, who's been leading their AI division since 2022, left a tenured university job to focus on KRAFTON's AI R&D and to lead the company's expansion into physical AI via the newly established Ludo Robotics.
Lee's new role focuses on making games smarter and more interactive
Lee's new role is all about making games smarter and more interactive—think better in-game characters you can actually play with (Co-Playable Characters), smoother game development, and using KRAFTON's simulation tech for real-world robotics.
He was key to their big 2025 NVIDIA partnership and helped build KRAFTON's own AI foundation model.
Lee has a PhD from UC Berkeley
Lee has a PhD from UC Berkeley and has published 57 papers at top conferences like NeurIPS and ICML. He specializes in machine learning, language processing, reinforcement learning, and more.
On LinkedIn he called KRAFTON AI "KRAFTON AI, the company's AI research and development unit, is 'already probably the strongest AI R&D entity for AI for gaming worldwide, and one of the best AI R&D entities in Korea. And we are not stopping there. '"—and he seems excited to prove it.
This CAIO position is brand new
This CAIO position is brand new—no one came before him—so Lee is setting the standard.
His appointment signals that KRAFTON sees AI as a huge part of gaming's future, both inside virtual worlds and beyond.