Samsung SDS said on Monday it has been selected as the preferred bidder for Woori Bank's project to build AI agents for AX.

The company said the project is an "AI agent banking" initiative that will connect Woori Bank's various business systems and build more than 175 AI agents. It said the project is meaningful as the first case in South Korea's financial sector to apply large-scale AI agents in earnest.

"AI agent banking" refers to a way of working in which AI, based on a large language model (LLM), carries out tasks directly, from customer responses to internal work.

Woori Bank decided to apply more than 175 AI agents to 29 core tasks across five areas: customer relationship management and corporate lending, wealth management, internal controls, customer counselling and workflow automation, reflecting input from the field. It said it expects to redesign existing work processes around AI agents to increase work efficiency and improve processing speed by about 30 percent.

In the project, Samsung SDS will newly build Woori Bank's AI agent platform and services based on its in-house AI agent platform, FabriX. It will also provide various language models to create an environment for applying AI to work. It plans to connect existing bank systems with AI and build a data management system to operate agents efficiently.

Samsung SDS plans to start the project in May, first rolling out about 90 AI agents in December this year. It plans to expand deployment in stages through August next year to complete an AI-based financial work environment.

Samsung SDS said it has also continued to support AX transformation by winning Woori Bank's phase 3 project after recently securing phase 2 of its "mid- to long-term IT infrastructure optimisation" initiative.

Lee Jung-heon (이정헌), head of the strategic marketing office and vice president at Samsung SDS, said, "In the financial industry, AI is rapidly evolving beyond simple work support toward changing the way work itself is done." He added, "Samsung SDS will actively support the financial sector's AX transformation based on experience in key projects in finance and AI and cloud technology capabilities."