[DigitalToday reporter Chi-kyu Hwang] "Introducing AI alone does not change a company's competitiveness. When electricity first entered factories, plants that redesigned production lines and work methods from scratch to fit electric power achieved bigger productivity gains than those that simply ran existing machines as they were. AI also needs to be used in a way that changes the work itself."

Kim Kyung-hoon (김경훈), OpenAI's head in South Korea, made the remarks in a keynote speech on Sept. 8 at Samsung SDS' enterprise AX conference, REAL Summit 2026, held at the COEX Convention Center in Seoul. He said the gap is widening between companies that use AI well and those that do not.

"Clear differences are emerging in productivity and ways of working depending on how deeply AI is used in the field," he said. "It is important to connect AI to actual work systems," he added.

He said AI needs access to in-house data and various work systems so it can handle more complex tasks beyond repetitive work such as checking customer information, drafting documents and analysing data.

Kim said companies also need security systems, such as granting appropriate authority to the data required.

Kim said assigning AI to carry out actual work, beyond being a simple support tool, is also an important element of AX.

He cited the use of "agents" as a representative example, where they search for materials, check systems to produce outputs and, when problems occur, find the cause on their own and try again. Kim said safeguards should be in place so that, when important judgement is needed, the system asks a person to make the decision.

Delivering results is also important when using AI. Kim said companies should measure how much they cut costs and raise revenue and productivity using AI, rather than how much AI was used. It is difficult to judge actual business value by comparing only model performance or usage, he said.