South Korea's government has designated NCSoft's AI subsidiary, NC AI, as the principal agency for the "Real-World Proactive Action-Type Agentic AI Technology Development Project," a four-year initiative running through 2029 with a total budget of ₩49.375 billion (approximately $34 million USD), of which ₩39.5 billion (approximately $27 million USD) comes from the state. The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and the Institute for Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP) made the designation on July 30. The consortium includes enterprise cloud provider Gabia, Korea University, and Yonsei University. Gabia's Hiworks groupware platform, which holds the top domestic market position in Korean corporate email and workplace collaboration, will serve as the live commercial testbed for deploying and stress-testing research outputs against real enterprise users before commercialization. The share of global IT decision-makers naming autonomous agents and agentic AI as a top technology priority rose more than 31 percent in a single year, according to the Futurum Group. Gartner projects that 40 percent of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from fewer than 5 percent in 2025. Fewer than 10 percent of organizations have successfully scaled an AI agent within any single business function, according to McKinsey's State of AI 2025 report, and Gartner warns that more than 40 percent of agent