The Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) said on Jan. 4 it held a New Year ceremony at its Bundang headquarters on Jan. 2 and began 2026 work aimed at leading the global digital order in an AI-native era.

Through the ceremony, TTA shared results including an “excellent” grade in a national R&D project evaluation for its ICT standardisation work, regulatory support for digital medical products for the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, and verification of commercial drones for the Defence Ministry, as it expanded into various new-industry fields.

Based on that, it declared 2026 a year of innovative growth, aiming to step up as a specialised institution leading efforts to secure AI reliability, a key driver of the country’s push to become one of the world’s three leading AI powers, and to establish global standards for digital trust.

TTA said it created a formal CX Innovation Team last year, upgrading a temporary task force, to improve customer convenience and reflect feedback from the field. It strengthened access by opening a dedicated customer communications hotline, integrating R&D results verification application channels that had been split into seven, and overhauling its website UI and UX.

As a result, a major customer satisfaction survey conducted by an external professional institution showed a score of 87.2 (A grade), up 3.5 points from the previous year’s 83.7. TTA said it will simplify test application documents, strengthen real-time provision of test and certification progress, and expand customer satisfaction training and test-and-certification quality training for employees to raise satisfaction further.

The ceremony also included encouragement and awards for employees who improved work efficiency and raised the association’s standing. In the AI-ON project contest, Moon Eun-ju, Jo Jin-woo and Kim Min-jun won the top prize for jointly proposing an “interactive LLM orchestration work automation platform.”

The association’s highest honour, TTA Person of the Year (top employee award), went to Deputy Manager Lee Kyung-jae for contributing to AI-ON project operations and promoting AI education. Manager Cha Soon-il and Senior Specialist Choi Jae-hyuk also received presidential citations for contributions to national industrial development.

Awards to meritorious individuals from state bodies and related institutions were also presented, including the science and ICT minister’s award (team leader Kang Bu-mi and nine others) and the National Intelligence Service director’s award (team leader Kim Jae-beom), for a total of 46 recipients.

TTA Chairman Seung-hyun Son said he would devote all efforts to responding to competition for dominance in future technologies and to advancing standardisation and AI reliability test and certification systems as a “Global Rule-Setter” in the AX era.