LG Uplus targets B2B market with in-house AI agent

Sung Joon-hyun, executive vice president of AI and Data Product at LG Uplus

South Korea’s LG Uplus Corp. will expand the usage of its in-house developed artificial intelligence (AI) work agent ixi to other companies and aims to commercialize it as a B2B business model.

“We are developing various AI-based products, including AI big data marketing targeting platforms, with a focus on developing AI agents,” Sung Joon-hyun, executive vice president of AI and Data Product at LG Uplus, said in a recent interview with Maeil Business Newspaper.

The AI agent refers to machine intelligence that understands users’ intentions and the context to provide responses, rather than a simple multiple-choice chatbot, he added.

The AI models developed by LG Uplus to date include contact center consultations, disability consultations, subscription product recommendations, and market solutions, among others.

“LG Uplus is applying AI technology across various sectors, starting with the mobile business,” Sung said.

In particular, LG Uplus has adopted AI Knowledge Management 2.0 solutions internally. This solution enables the company and employees to build various knowledge databases and allows employees to query and receive responses through AI.

It also opens the door for each department, such as contact centers, human resources management, and legal affairs, to introduce their own AI solutions.

Sung noted that LG Uplus Chief Executive Officer Hwang Hyeon-sik has emphasized that all members should be able to use AI, highlighting that the “internally developed solution does not have concerns about leaking information to the outside world, unlike ChatGPT.”

LG Uplus not only uses these solutions internally but also provides them to other companies as solutions.

“Combining retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with the AI foundation model is an advantage of an AI work agent,” Sung said. “We will increase business efficiency by using a subscription-based service model.”

Currently, LG Uplus’ AI work agent has been adopted in contact centers in the financial sector, providing new services along with corporate internet lines via a B2B model.

“It does not take long to adapt LG Uplus’ AI work agent to other companies,” Sung said. “After around a week of ingesting documents, the work agent provides fairly accurate answers.”

[Courtesy of LG Uplus Corp.]

LG Uplus also plans to launch an AI agent to manage and inspect network quality. This model, which has learnt 10,000 types of communication failures, helps field technicians to respond quickly to incidents.

The company also plans to introduce agents that consult with customers on their communication plans and recommend plans via Uplus.com in 2024. LG Group, with the LG AI Research Institute at its center, currently shares AI directions and experiences across the entire conglomerate.

LG Uplus is accelerating the introduction of AI not only in B2C transactions but also in B2B businesses. It is developing ixi-GEN, which is based on EXAONE 2.0 and can be used in various sectors, in collaboration with LG AI Research Institute.

With the increasing use of AI, LG Uplus achieved sales of 14.4 trillion won ($10.7 billion) and operating profit of 998 billion won in 2023.

Regarding the future direction of AI, Sung noted AI’s “OS-ification” as well as the globalization of agents.

“AI has simplified the interface of apps and the web into a simple tool of questions and answers,” he said. “Just as the app ecosystem has apps on top of the OS today, AI is expected to play the role of an OS where various services operate on top of AI moving forward.”

He also predicted that in the future world, AI will exchange and supplement information within itself to create a so-called “world of agent.”