Kakao's Kanana AI agent faded to 66 installs a day after launching outside KakaoTalk

Kanana, Kakao's conversational AI agent designed to understand the context of users' group chat conversations, summarizing and joining them.

A conversational AI that understands group-chat context can grow as its own app — and eventually monetize on subscription.

Kakao positioned AI as a key engine for future growth, streamlining affiliates, and introduced Kanana at its if kakaoAI 2024 event in October 2024, with the beta launching May 8, 2025.

Daily new installs peaked at about 19,000 on May 15, then collapsed — to below 100 a day, with just 66 recorded on June 14, while OpenAI's ChatGPT kept drawing over 30,000 daily installs in Korea. Total installs stood at a little over 75,200 by June 14.

The standalone-app decision drew the blame: every participant in a group chat had to install Kanana for its headline features to work, cutting accessibility and starving the model of the chat data KakaoTalk could have provided.

An AI whose core value is group-chat context cannot reach groups if every member must first download a separate app.

Starting from zero chat data, instead of training on KakaoTalk's conversations, made the personalization promise slower to deliver.

KakaoTalk's distribution was the one asset no rival could match — and the launch decision left it unused.

Distribution is the product for a social AI: an agent built for group chats cannot grow outside the platform where the groups already are.

Kakao kept iterating through the beta — adding response-quality assessment, user feedback collection and message reactions — and planned the official launch later in 2025, with product lead Kim Jong-han stressing the service "improves the more it is used".