IMI is moving to strengthen protections for emotional labour workers by demonstrating an artificial intelligence-based counselling support system.

IMI, operator of ItemMania, said on May 13 it completed technology verification after participating in an EICN-led project titled "Development and demonstration of an AI counselling assist system supporting early response and decision-making for emotional risk among emotional labour workers." The project was pursued under an industry-academia-research cooperation structure involving Konkuk University and the Korea Electronics Technology Institute.

Because of the nature of game item trading platforms, issues such as payments, refunds, suspected fraud and account-related disputes often arise, frequently leading to heightened emotions between customers and agents. IMI has provided actual customer counselling data since 2023 to verify the system under conditions similar to the operating environment.

Based on an AI contact centre, the system analyses text and voice to identify a customer's emotional state in real time. It detects emotional risk situations in advance, such as profanity, criticism and dispute-related utterances, and provides real-time alerts and response guidance to agents to prevent escalation.

The company also confirmed the potential to improve overall counselling quality by reducing workload and raising efficiency in handling repeat inquiries through AI-based support functions such as automatic summaries of counselling content and knowledge recommendations.

Oh Hyo-jin (오효진), a team leader at IMI, said, "Given the nature of game item trading, various complaints and dispute situations occur, and through the demonstration of AI counselling assist we were able to confirm the applicability of counselling support functions." She added, "We will continue to review expanding the application of AI-related functions in ways that can improve customer service quality and operational efficiency."