KT aims to expand AI system and services by 2025

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KT aims to expand AI system and services by 2025

Published: 21 Jun. 2023, 16:57 Updated: 21 Jun. 2023, 17:17

Song Jae-ho, vice president of KT’s AI/DX convergence business division, speaks at the press event in Jung District, central Seoul, on Wednesday. [KT]

KT will invest 7 trillion won ($5.4 billion) to develop a large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) system and services by 2025 by expanding its AI-related offerings in logistics, robots, and healthcare.

The plan comes as tech companies at home and abroad are competing to tap the growing demand for AI, fueled by OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The Korean telecom operator aims to generate at least 1 trillion won of annual revenue via the AI segment by 2025. The company said at a press event that it had cumulative orders worth over 800 billion won in its AI businesses, streaming from its AI contact center (AICC) and logistics. AICC is a customer service center that incorporates AI algorithms and machine learning techniques to automate various aspects of customer interactions and support.

KT has big plans to also become a customer-based AI service provider and will invest 7 trillion won until 2027 as it views AI as a new growth engine.

“Four trillion won will be spent to acquire technologies for large-scale AI, 2 trillion won will be spent to advance AI infrastructure and related cloud services, and 1 trillion won will be spent to uncover new models for AI-related services in sectors of robot, education, and healthcare,” Song Jae-ho, vice president of KT’s AI/DX convergence business division, said at the press event in Jung District, central Seoul, on Wednesday.

The five sectors that the company is focusing on are AICC, logistics, robotics, healthcare, and education.

“In terms of revenue, AICC already constitutes a considerable part of the company’s total revenue — 350 billion won will be from the center by 2025; 500 billion won from logistics; 200 billion won from robotics; 200 billion won from education and 50 billion won from healthcare — so in total, about 1.3 trillion won of yearly revenue will be streamed from AI businesses. This is excluding revenue from the large-scale language model Mi:dm, which we will unveil in the latter half of this year.”

Mi:dm, which will eventually be made available on a wide range of the company’s digital services, will be revealed at the end of the third quarter this year, according to Choi Joon-ki, senior vice president of KT’s AI/Big Data business division.

KT aims to be the middleman between AI and consumers and offer customized services to fit their needs using the data that it has gathered over the years as a telecom provider.

“What we learned while running our business is that it’s not just about providing people with certain services,” Song said. “Our job as a middleman is to provide an end-to-end consumer experience, from explicitly identifying what type of services or functions that people actually need, providing them, then continuing to update and fix the platforms or services to fit various consumer demands.”

KT aims to diversify its AI robot lineup by expanding its line of delivery robot models that can function outdoors; logistics robots that will distribute the needed items in factories and logistics centers to robots fitted for delivering heavy objects in the agriculture industry.

The company also presented its technology dubbed “AI Food Tag,” which can identify 1,000 different foods’ nutritional value and calorie intake via a photo of the meal. The technology helps chronically ill patients monitor their diet and, with the help of large-scale AI, will be developed further to provide dietary information for 2,000 different foods.

KT will also take its digital healthcare business overseas, first targeting the Vietnamese market via its medical subsidiary in the country that was founded in January. In collaboration with Vietnamese medical facilities, the subsidiary offers AI healthcare services, such as gathering and analyzing data from medical checkups, for chronically ill patients. Domestically, KT is developing a healthcare service in which AI analyzes patients' medical data as well as notes from doctors and nutritionists to design food plans or healthcare plans for the patients.

In education, KT partnered up with the Gyeonggido Office of Education to implement its AI platform in the latter half of this year. The platform will use AI to draw up automated class materials for teachers and use data on students' progress to come up with tailored class content.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]