This comes just days after pumping $100 million into ChatGPT rival, Anthropic
SK Telecom (SKT) describes itself as “a leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital infrastructure company”. In February at MWC in Barcelona, it unveiled plans to achieve ‘AI to Everywhere’ by driving innovations in five areas: Customer & Technology; Time & Space; AI Transformation (AIX) for Industries; Core Business Model; and ESG. it’s wasting no time making good on the announcement.
Earlier this month, the operator put $100 million into AI firm Anthropic whose ‘ethical’ chatbot is called Claude. This week SKT has invested in another AI challenger, Persona AI, a Korean contact centre specialist.
Getting personal
SKT has not said how much it has pumped into Persona AI, only that it is now the firm’s third-largest stake holder. The AI company has developed a natural language processing engine to which businesses can subscribe to provide automated customer service.
Persona AI has domestic and overseas subscribers and is also running pilots in the financial services sector, with KB Financial Group and Hanwha General Insurance. Replacing human agents cuts costs, is scalable so waiting times can be kept to a minimum and can run 24×7.
On the other hand, AI-powered voice recognition and understanding have still a long way to go to rival humans but many millions of people the world over have figured out how to accommodate limitations using voice-activated services like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.
SKT intends to combine its own Korean-speaking assistant, NUGU, which was introduced in 2016, with Persona’s natural language engine to offer Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) to small and medium-sized enterprises.
SKT cited Allied Market Research’s prediction that the Korean AI-powered contact centre market will grow by 23.7% per year, on average, throughout the rest of the decade. By 2030, it will be worth KRW454.6 billion ($340 million) according to the analyst.
Beyond the call centre
SKT and Persona intend to expand into other areas too, such as voice recognition kiosks and voice-activated robots.
Lee Gyu-sik, Head of SKT’s AI Contact Centre (AICC) Business, commented, “We plan to lead the AICC market and expand the ecosystem so that voice AI can be used not only in contact centres but also in various industrial areas.”
SKT is also founder member of the Global Telco AI Alliance, launched in late July, along with Deutsche Telekom (which has a long-standing technology partnership with sKT), e& (formerly Etisalat) and Singtel.