[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] "In the face of a wave of uncertainty caused by AI, the core of change is to expand developers’ roles."

Kim Hwan (김환), CTO who oversees technology strategy at South Korean major retail company CJ Olive Young, stressed that in a situation where AI is developing rapidly, it is important for developers to expand their roles beyond the boundaries of their specialities to respond to change.

He highlighted the role of developers in corporate AI strategy at AWS Summit Seoul 2026, hosted by AWS at COEX on May 19. He made it clear that CJ Olive Young is also expanding its AI development workforce at a company-wide level to respond quickly to change.

He said, "We are recruiting forward deployed engineers with expertise and setting up new organisations. We are also reshaping the organisation to increase the speed of decision-making. We created a full-stack development organisation that can directly identify on-site problems and carry out everything from design to deployment."

According to him, CJ Olive Young is also building an AI-native development system based on AWS. The focus is on applying the concept of AIDLC, which combines AI with the existing software development life cycle to speed up processes.

Kim said, "Through workshops with AWS, we tested various tools such as Amazon Q and Kiro, and we are expanding this to the overall development process while building an AI sandbox. We introduced Amazon Q Business for all job groups across the company, and we are also providing Amazon Q Developer licences to the development job group." Amazon Q Business is an AI app development tool aimed at business users, and Amazon Q Developer targets developers.

At the event, Kim defined CJ Olive Young’s digital strategy as the evolution of an omnichannel platform that spans offline and online in stores. He also shared details of the IT modernisation process the company has pursued.

He said, "CJ Olive Young was a store-centred retail company, but over the past few years it has evolved into a platform and is changing into a completely different company. The online mall’s monthly active users exceeded 10 million, and the number of stores is about 1,400. The number of members is 17 million, and global delivery has expanded to more than 150 countries."

He also cited 'Today Dream' offered by CJ Olive Young as a leading success story. He explained, "When a customer orders a product in the app, Today Dream checks inventory at a nearby store or logistics centre and delivers it within 24 hours. To do that, you need to connect online and offline logistics in real time and process orders while operating integrated real-time inventory."

According to Kim, CJ Olive Young began to push in earnest a cloud transition about 5 years ago. In the process, CJ Olive Young did not choose a so-called lift-and-shift method, which moves existing on-premise systems to the cloud as-is without changing code or architecture.

Kim said, "In enterprise migration, the lift-and-shift strategy was considered a best practice, but we judged it did not fit CJ Olive Young. Olive Young has large events every quarter, so to avoid delaying business growth, we had to plan in two-month cycles, transition within one month, and put it into real operations. We are focusing on balancing business speed and stability by mixing microservices into a monolithic structure."