SK Telecom to launch AI assistants for corporate clients

SK Telecom Co., South Korea’s top mobile carrier, plans to introduce customized services to connect major large language models (LLMs) and corporate clients’ systems as it aims to seek future growth drives in the artificial intelligence sector given the saturation of its existing telco business.

SK Telecom is scheduled to launch a corporate AI minutes service in the third quarter based on LLMs, which each client desires to use, rather than a specific deep learning algorithm, according to industry sources on Sunday.

The company is also poised to unveil other enterprise AI assistant services for all corporate works such as legal affairs, human resources, manufacturing and sales utilizing not only its A.X but also other LLMs including Open AI’s GPT-4, Google’s Llama 2 and Anthropic’s Claude 2.

SK Telecom aims to provide tailored solutions, which are equivalent to clients’ system integration projects.

“Corporate clients first ask whether we have customized AI services for them,” said an SK Telecom official. “The corporate AI assistant market is expandible without limits.”

The company in January already introduced the Enterprise AI Market, a tool, which allows corporate managers to create generative AI apps on their own. A user can make an in-house app by entering simple commands without coding skills. About 200 startups and public institutions are using the platform.

SK Telecom, which expected to make money from its AI business starting this year, is increasing investments in the sector. Its AI workforce currently makes up 40% of the total employees, up from 29.2% in January 2023.

GROWING COMPETITION

The corporate AI assistant market will be separated from the general-purpose AI sector, which is limited in security and expertise, industry sources predicted.

Corporate clients need a service capable of generating an earnings statement based on confidential data, for example, according to the sources.

Other South Korean companies such as Naver Corp., KT Corp. and LG Uplus Corp. rushed to the corporate AI assistant market with strategies of showcasing their technology through business-to-consumer services to make money in the business-to-business sector.

Samsung SDS Co., the information technology service unit of Samsung Group, launched the Brity Copilot, a generative AI service for corporates, which assists common business processes such as emails, meetings, messaging and document management, on May 2.

SK C&C also introduced the Solur, an enterprise AI solution optimized to check financial information and industry trends.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com
 
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.