KRAFTON APPOINTS KANGWOOK LEE AS CHIEF AI OFFICER TO ADVANCE AI-DRIVEN GAME INNOVATION

KRAFTON, Inc. today announced the appointment of Kangwook Lee as Chief AI Officer (CAIO), a newly established executive role overseeing the company’s global AI research and development strategy.

Lee, who has served as Head of KRAFTON AI since 2022 while building a strong track record across both academia and industry, will continue to lead initiatives focused on advancing AI technologies that enhance gameplay experiences and support development teams. His appointment reflects KRAFTON’s continued investment in AI as a tool to expand creative possibility while keeping human developers at the center of game design and decision-making.

Lee earned his PhD in 2016 from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and previously served as a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a courtesy appointment in Computer Sciences. His academic research spans machine learning and deep learning, and he has authored 57 peer-reviewed papers presented at leading global AI conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.

At KRAFTON, Lee has directed internal research across AI fields, including machine learning, language models, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and multimodal systems. At the same time, he led major initiatives including a collaboration with NVIDIA to develop CPCs (Co-Playable Characters), AI-driven companions designed to enable real-time interaction between players and in-game teammates. He also heads KRFATON’s proprietary foundation model project designed to support game development and long-term innovation. Lee recently stepped down from his tenured academic position to focus fully on KRAFTON’s AI R&D.

Under Lee’s leadership, KRAFTON’s AI strategy will focus on three core areas:

• Elevating Gameplay: KRAFTON will continue developing AI features designed to deepen immersion, responsiveness, and player interaction. Technologies such as CPCs are intended to complement human-designed gameplay systems, with studios maintaining full creative ownership and final decision-making authority. AI is applied where it meaningfully enhances player experience while preserving the handcrafted elements that define each title.
• Supporting Development Teams: KRAFTON is investing in AI tools that help streamline repetitive or technical tasks, enabling developers to spend more time on creative planning, storytelling, and design. The company views AI as a way to support its workforce by reducing friction in production workflows and empowering teams to focus on craft. AI-driven analytics and development tools operate using authorized and responsibly managed data in accordance with applicable privacy standards
• Exploring Long-Term Research Opportunities: Building on its experience operating large-scale, physics-based virtual worlds, KRAFTON is also conducting long-term research into physical AI and robotics through a newly established entity, Ludo Robotics, with operations in the United States and Korea. This research remains exploratory and focused on software intelligence, leveraging simulation environments to test and validate complex systems. Games remain KRAFTON’s core business, and future research initiatives are designed to build on the company’s foundational strengths in interactive technology.

“KRAFTON uses AI to amplify human imagination and creativity, not replace it,” said Kangwook Lee, Chief AI Officer at KRAFTON. “Our goal is to build better experiences for players while investing in technologies that empower our teams and support long-term innovation.”
 
More information about KRAFTON’s AI initiatives can be found at https://www.krafton.ai/en/.

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CAIO Kangwook Lee Bio
Kangwook Lee is the CAIO of KRAFTON, overseeing the company's entire AI R&D efforts, including AI for next-generation video games and AI for game development. Previously, he was an Associate Professor with Tenure in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Computer Sciences Department (by courtesy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD in 2016 from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC Berkeley. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Amazon Research Award, the KSEA Young Investigator Grant Award and multiple best papers awards including the IEEE Joint Communications Society/Information Theory Society Paper Award. His professional service includes serving as Area Chair for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and COLM, on the Program Committee for MLSys, and as an Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research.