[Samseog Ko's insight]Beyond Competition, Toward Co-evolution: A New Future Korea and Japan Build Together

Samseog Ko  |  Distinguished Professor, Dongguk University  ·  Member, National AI Committee

At ASTEEDA Executive Salon 2026 in Nozawa Onsen, Samseog Ko frames artificial intelligence as the force pushing two longtime competitors toward joint platforms, shared IP and a common ‘EnterTech’ ecosystem.

One of the most important changes in the 21st-century global economy is that the very nature of competition between companies is shifting. In the industrial era, firms believed they could grow only by defeating their rivals. The market was understood as a zero-sum game. But today’s economy, led by digital platforms and artificial intelligence (AI), is different. Companies now compete and cooperate at the same time, and grow together even as they cooperate, building a new order in the process. To describe this current, I have long emphasized the concept of “co-evolution.”

Co-evolution originated in evolutionary biology. It refers to the phenomenon in which different species evolve together through continuous interaction. Flowers and bees, forests and microorganisms are representative examples. Evolutionary economics and business-ecosystem theory later began applying the concept to relationships among companies, industries, and nations. A company no longer grows alone. It achieves greater innovation and sustainable growth when it evolves together with diverse partners in its ecosystem.

From this perspective, Korea and Japan are Asia’s most important “co-evolution partners.” The two countries have long competed — fiercely, across electronics, automobiles, semiconductors, and content. But as the AI era takes full hold, challenges are emerging that competition alone cannot solve: talent shortages, technological transition, dependence on global platforms, and the rapid transformation of content markets. In the content and entertainment industries in particular, the need for co-evolution between the two countries is growing ever greater.

Korea has secured global cultural influence centered on K-pop, drama, webtoons, and games. Japan, meanwhile, maintains world-class competitiveness in animation, character IP, fandom business, and offline experiential content. The two are ideal partners, each able to complement what the other lacks. In this sense, the “ASTEEDA Executive Salon 2026,” recently held in Japan, carries great symbolic significance.

ASTEEDA is evolving into something more than a business event — a platform where entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators design new business opportunities together. It is worth noting that several hundred senior executives from across Japan take part in person, generating new investments, partnerships, and even mergers and acquisitions.

Among the combinations worth watching at this gathering, held in Nozawa Onsen, Nagano, are companies such as Japan’s Lotte Holdings and Korea’s ESTsoft. Lotte is a company that connects Korea and Japan, occupying a unique position in its simultaneous understanding of both markets, their consumers, and their brand networks. ESTsoft, on the other hand, is a leading Korean AI company driving rapid innovation in AI, digital humans, and generative AI services.

AI sits at the center of this change. Yet to understand AI as merely a tool that assists content production is to miss the point. AI is rewriting the entire value chain of the content industry, from planning through production, distribution, and consumption. At the planning stage, data becomes the starting point of creation; in production, generative AI creates video, music, and characters; in distribution, recommendation algorithms decide which content reaches whom; and in consumption, AI humans and AI characters interact directly with users. We have entered an age in which the capacity to create good content and the AI capacity to learn, transform, and personalize it can no longer be separated.

Here, Korea and Japan find themselves in similar positions. Neither country has secured its own large-scale foundation model of the kind led by the United States and China. A structure that depends on overseas platforms for the core infrastructure of generative AI is a weakness the two share. At the same time, their strengths point in different directions. Korea is moving quickly in generative AI services, digital humans, and the use of content data, while Japan holds a vast accumulation of character IP, robotics and precision engineering, and extensive fandom data. The path ESTsoft is charting in digital humans and generative AI, and the distribution and tourism data Lotte has built across both countries, themselves point to the possibility of combination.

If they respond to this current scattered and apart, both countries risk remaining trapped in the subcontracting structure of global platforms. Talent is scarce, data is dispersed, and markets at the level of a single nation are not large enough to cultivate a general-purpose AI model independently. But if the two pool their data and IP, their talent and capital, the story changes. Together they can build content-specialized AI models that learn not only Korean and Japanese but the sentiments and narratives, the characters and fandoms of Asia. The domain that general-purpose models from the United States and China cannot fill — an AI that deeply understands the Asian context — becomes real only when the two join hands.

This is why co-evolution in the AI era is less a matter of choice than a condition of survival.

What future becomes possible if Korean and Japanese companies pursue a co-evolution strategy? Drawing on the discussion at the ASTEEDA Executive Salon session on “Media and Entertainment in the AI Era and Korea-Japan Co-evolution,” it can be organized as follows.

First, building AI-based entertainment platforms. Combining the distribution, tourism, and lifestyle infrastructure Lotte holds with ESTsoft’s AI technology, for example, could create a new kind of customer-experience platform — one where AI characters assist shopping, AI humans provide tourism services, and K-content and Japanese cultural content are distributed side by side.

Second, joint Korea-Japan IP development. Korea excels at global content planning and production; Japan is strong in character business and long-term IP management. If companies from both countries jointly build AI-based characters and story universes, they can secure competitiveness not only in the Asian market but in the global one.

Third, building an “Entertainment Tech” ecosystem. I look to the future of the cultural industry in “EnterTech,” where entertainment and technology converge — a new industrial ecosystem combining content with AI, XR, robotics, and digital humans. Korea and Japan each have strengths in this field: Korea in content planning and production, Japan in robotics, precision engineering, and the character industry. Working together, they could build a world-class EnterTech hub in Asia.

Fourth, a joint strategy for entering Southeast Asia. The era in which Korean and Japanese companies enter markets in separate competition is passing. What is needed now is a model of joint entry. Combining Korea’s Hallyu network with Japan’s local business networks can generate far greater synergy in ASEAN markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

Above all, what matters is a shift in thinking. For a long time we viewed Korea-Japan relations through the frame of competition. But the winner of the AI era is not the strongest company; it is the company that cooperates and grows with the most partners. Co-evolution does not deny competition. It innovates through competition and grows through cooperation. A structure in which competition and cooperation form a virtuous cycle is precisely what co-evolution is. In this sense, the ASTEEDA Executive Salon 2026 can be not an ordinary business event but a new starting point for the co-evolution of Korean and Japanese companies.

The meeting of Lotte Holdings and ESTsoft is only one example. In the years ahead, more Korean and Japanese companies must build new models of cooperation across content, AI, entertainment, tourism, distribution, and platforms. The future of companies in both countries lies not in competition alone. It lies on the path of co-evolution, of growing together. And that path will prove to be the most realistic and powerful growth strategy — one that reaches beyond Asia toward the world.