SK Telecom said on Sunday that more than 7,500 of its employees use AI agents every month and over 4,000 have built agents of their own, according to The Korea Herald. The South Korean carrier is now trying to turn that adoption into measurable productivity gains as it looks for growth beyond its traditional telecom business through AI services and data centers.
About 1,500 agents are in regular use, handling reports, network data analysis and routine tasks. The push started with a companywide initiative launched in March that encouraged employees to build AI tools for their own jobs.
SK Telecom is now trying to apply those tools across entire departments, which requires access to company databases, existing software and sensitive information. Kim In-soo, head of SK Telecom's AI Board, said most of the problems individual employees could solve on their own have been solved, and the harder ones that need company support are now surfacing.
“You identify a task where AI could be highly effective, only to discover that the data it needs cannot be provided”— Kim In-soo, Head of SK Telecom's AI Board
Key facts
- 01More than 7,500 SK Telecom employees use AI agents monthly, and over 4,000 have built their own.
- 02About 1,500 agents are in regular use for reports, network data analysis and routine tasks.
- 03In a project covering about 9,000 databases and 300,000 data fields, answer accuracy rose from around 40% to over 80%.
- 04SK Telecom AI Board head Kim In-soo estimated external AI processing would cost 100 million to 200 million won a year.
- 05CEO Jung Jae-hun said AI productivity gains would be used to redeploy employees to growth businesses.
Data is one of those harder problems. In one project covering about 9,000 databases and 300,000 data fields, SK Telecom used AI to write plain-language explanations of technical labels. That raised the accuracy of answers to related questions from around 40% to over 80%.
Kim estimated that external AI processing would cost 100 million to 200 million won a year, or roughly $75,000 to $150,000. SK Telecom used its own models and infrastructure instead, but did not disclose the actual savings.
To handle sensitive records, SK Telecom built a system that keeps that data separate from the AI models. Agents can process tasks such as employee medical expense claims without directly accessing the original records.
The company is also reviewing which agents justify their operating costs, rather than counting agents as the measure of success.
“Our goal isn't simply to reduce the number of agents. It's to produce results”— Kim In-soo, Head of SK Telecom's AI Board
CEO Jung Jae-hun recently said productivity gains from AI would be used to redeploy employees to SK Telecom's growth businesses.
SK Telecom has not disclosed how much its AI initiatives have cut costs or lifted companywide productivity. Kim said employees are finishing individual tasks faster but did not give specific figures.
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