SK Square (402340) is rolling out an artificial intelligence-based internal work system that it says makes formal handovers unnecessary. AI agents automatically collect and organize the information that accumulates through employees' reports, emails and schedules, allowing any staff member to find the knowledge they need in real time. 11st, an SK Square affiliate, is overhauling its business model to become an AI commerce platform.
Kim Yong-hoon, head of AI innovation and chief AI officer at SK Square, outlined the AX strategy in an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily at SKT Tower in Jung-gu, Seoul, on the 28th.
Kim oversees AX across SK Square and its portfolio companies. He has assembled a task force of about 50 people called "10x," drawn from SK Square, 11st, SK Planet and TMAP Mobility, and is running projects that cut across company and departmental lines. "Planning and development are not separated in this team," Kim said. "We sometimes jokingly call each other 'plan-velopers.'"
The flagship result is an internal knowledge data hub called Kiwi, in which AI updates the company's knowledge base as new information comes in. "Office workers are said to spend more than 20% of their total working hours just searching for information, and Kiwi can greatly improve work efficiency," Kim said. "It goes as far as letting you get up to speed on your work without a handover when you join a new organization." He added that access rights for each document are carried over exactly as they are set on the intranet, in order to maintain internal security.
The AX experiment extends to 11st's shift to an AI commerce platform. "If we build an AI catalog system that manages product information in a form AI can easily understand, the chances rise that AI chatbots such as GPT will recommend products listed on 11st," Kim said. "Our goal is to move beyond the existing open-market business model and become a company suited to the age of agent commerce."
SK Square is also running a project called Synapse that links customer data across its portfolio companies. The plan is to combine scattered information — purchase data from 11st, movement and location data from TMAP Mobility, and OK Cashbag data from SK Planet — so that an AI agent can analyze a single person's spending tastes and tendencies as a whole. "Rather than looking at one person's data separately, looking at it in an integrated way lets us build far better hyper-personalized services," the CAIO said. "For example, we could recommend camping gear on 11st and camping sites on TMAP to a customer who likes camping."
