Striding purposefully across the stage at a packed media briefing held in Seoul in early February, Shina Chung, CEO of Korean internet giant Kakao, leaned in to greet OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman. After six months of negotiations, the two companies had just sealed a partnership that would give Kakao (market cap: $20 billion) access to the American AI titan’s powerful technology. As Chung declared on stage, it could potentially turn “all imaginable AI-era services into reality”—and give #Kakao a fighting chance to leapfrog the competition. With #OpenAI’s help, Kakao hopes to realize its ambitions of being at the forefront of providing hyper-personalized services to the 49 million users of its ubiquitous superapp KakaoTalk, which equals about 94% of the country’s population. Chung is targeting a November rollout of so-called #AI agents—next generation virtual assistants that can go beyond answering basic questions to making decisions and even taking actions on behalf of users. “We neede...