Two South Korean services have quietly earned spots on a global ranking that most Western observers didn’t see coming. SK Telecom’s AI assistant A.dot and Naver’s real-time translation tool Papago now sit among the 50 most-used generative AI products in the world, according to a report released by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Not OpenAI. Not Google DeepMind. A telecom company and a search portal — both headquartered in Seoul.
The ranking, which Andreessen Horowitz compiles by analyzing web and mobile traffic data, measures actual user engagement rather than hype cycles or funding rounds. That distinction matters. Plenty of AI companies command enormous valuations and breathless media coverage without demonstrating that real people use their products on a regular basis. The a16z list cuts through that noise, and the presence of two Korean entrants signals something significant about the geography of AI adoption.
A.dot is not new. SK Telecom initially launched it as a voice-based virtual assistant, not unlike Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. But the company retooled the product with generative AI capabilities, turning it into something considerably more ambitious — a multimodal assistant capable of handling complex queries, generating content, and integrating with SKT’s broader suite of telecommunications services. The pivot paid off. As reported by MSN, A.dot’s user base surged after the generative AI upgrade, powered largely by the Korean domestic market’s appetite for AI-enhanced mobile experiences.
South Korea is a country where smartphone penetration exceeds 97%. That creates fertile ground.
Naver’s Papago, on the other hand, took a different path to the top 50. The translation service has been around since 2017, originally built on neural machine translation models. Its generative AI integration — layering large language model capabilities on top of existing translation infrastructure — expanded both accuracy and the range of languages it handles well. For Korean-to-English and Korean-to-Japanese translation, Papago is widely considered superior to Google Translate among Korean users. That local dominance, combined with growing international usage from travelers and business professionals engaging with Korean markets, propelled it onto the global list.
What makes this ranking particularly interesting is who else is on it. The a16z top 50 is dominated by American and Chinese companies. ChatGPT, naturally, sits near the top. So do products from Anthropic, Midjourney, and various Chinese AI labs like Baidu’s Ernie Bot and Moonshot AI’s Kimi. The inclusion of two Korean products amid that company suggests that AI adoption patterns are more geographically distributed than Silicon Valley’s self-referential discourse tends to acknowledge.
And the Korean government has noticed. Seoul has been aggressively funding AI development as part of its broader industrial strategy. In January 2025, the South Korean government announced a 1.4 trillion won ($1 billion) AI investment package aimed at nurturing domestic champions capable of competing globally. That investment covers everything from semiconductor R&D to AI model training infrastructure. SKT and Naver are among the primary beneficiaries.
SK Telecom’s approach to AI deserves closer scrutiny. The company isn’t just building consumer-facing products. It’s constructing an entire AI infrastructure layer within its telecom network. In May 2025, SKT announced partnerships with several global AI firms to integrate AI-powered network optimization tools, part of CEO Ryu Young-sang’s stated ambition to transform the company from a traditional telecom operator into an “AI company.” Whether that’s corporate rhetoric or operational reality remains to be seen. But the A.dot numbers suggest real traction.
The product has benefited from SKT’s distribution advantage. With roughly 30 million mobile subscribers in South Korea — a country of 52 million people — SKT can push A.dot directly to handsets through carrier pre-installation deals and promotional bundling. That’s a distribution channel most AI startups can only dream about. It’s the same playbook that made Samsung’s Bixby ubiquitous on Galaxy devices, even if actual engagement with Bixby was historically tepid. The difference with A.dot, according to the a16z data, is that people are actually using it.
Naver operates from a different position of strength. It’s the dominant search engine in South Korea, commanding roughly 60% of the domestic search market. Google, for all its global dominance, remains a secondary player in Korea. That search monopoly gives Naver enormous data advantages and a built-in user base for any AI product it launches. Papago benefits from being integrated into Naver’s search results, its shopping platform, and its webtoon and news services. When a Korean user encounters foreign-language content anywhere in the Naver universe, Papago is one tap away.
But there’s a tension in Naver’s AI strategy that industry watchers have flagged. The company is simultaneously developing its own large language model, HyperCLOVA X, while also maintaining products like Papago that could eventually be subsumed by a single unified AI assistant. Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon has publicly stated that HyperCLOVA X will become the backbone of all Naver AI services. If that consolidation happens, Papago as a standalone product might eventually disappear, absorbed into a more comprehensive conversational AI interface. For now, though, Papago’s independent success on the global stage gives Naver validation — and data — that informs the broader HyperCLOVA X development effort.
The a16z ranking methodology itself is worth examining. The firm uses a combination of SimilarWeb traffic data and Sensor Tower mobile analytics to estimate monthly active users and engagement metrics. It’s not a perfect measure. Products with heavy API usage — like many enterprise AI tools — don’t show up well in web and app traffic data. And products popular in markets with fragmented app stores, like China, may be undercounted. Still, it’s one of the more rigorous attempts to measure actual AI usage rather than relying on self-reported figures from companies with obvious incentives to inflate their numbers.
One thing the ranking makes clear: generative AI usage is no longer a story about a handful of American products. Yes, ChatGPT and its competitors dominate. But the edges of the top 50 are increasingly populated by regional champions — products that dominate specific languages, specific use cases, or specific national markets. Papago owns Korean translation. A.dot owns the Korean mobile AI assistant category. Neither needs to conquer the American market to generate enormous engagement numbers.
This pattern mirrors what happened in previous technology waves. Search didn’t remain an American monopoly — Baidu dominated China, Yandex dominated Russia, Naver dominated Korea. Social media fragmented similarly, with KakaoTalk, WeChat, and Line carving out regional empires. Generative AI appears to be following the same trajectory, with local language capabilities and cultural context creating natural moats that even the best-funded Silicon Valley products struggle to cross.
So what comes next for SKT and Naver? Both companies face the challenge of expanding beyond their home market. A.dot’s Korean-language optimization makes it formidable domestically but less useful for English or Japanese speakers. Papago has more natural international appeal as a translation tool, but it competes against Google Translate’s massive multilingual corpus and DeepL’s growing reputation for quality. Neither Korean company has announced concrete plans for aggressive international expansion of these specific products, though both are investing heavily in multilingual AI capabilities through their respective LLM development programs.
The competitive pressure is intensifying at home, too. Samsung Electronics, Korea’s largest company by market capitalization, has been integrating Google’s Gemini models into its Galaxy devices while also developing its own on-device AI capabilities. KT Corporation, SKT’s main telecom rival, launched its own AI assistant and is partnering with Microsoft on enterprise AI solutions. Even Kakao, the company behind Korea’s dominant messaging app, has been building generative AI features into its platform. The Korean AI market, small in geographic terms, is fiercely contested.
For global AI watchers, the takeaway from the a16z ranking is straightforward. Market position matters as much as model quality. SKT and Naver didn’t crack the top 50 by building the world’s most sophisticated large language models. They did it by embedding AI capabilities into products that tens of millions of people already use daily, in a language that global competitors handle poorly. Distribution plus linguistic specificity equals massive adoption. That formula works in Korea. It likely works in dozens of other markets too — which means the next iteration of the a16z top 50 could feature even more names that most American tech observers have never heard of.
The era of AI as a purely Silicon Valley story is over. It probably never existed in the first place.
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