SK AX on June 16 held the IMAGINE AX 2026 conference at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas hotel and shared AI transformation cases in manufacturing, finance, telecommunications, retail and services.

In a keynote speech, SK AX CEO Kim Wanjong (김완종) said corporate competitiveness lies not in adopting better AI but in creating new growth value through companywide optimisation using AI. He said a gap between companies that have improved work efficiency and achieved enterprise-wide augmentation with AI and those that have not is already beginning to show up in management performance, and that the gap will widen further.

He added that for companies to stand at the top of that gap, they must build core AI transformation capabilities beyond simply adopting AI, including strategy, technology, data, operating systems, talent and change management. He stressed that SK AX has verified such capabilities by practising “Being AX” while considering itself its first customer.

SK AX said the core foundation of “Being AX” is a strategic roadmap. It said the purpose of introducing AI and the expected outcomes must be clearly set. It added that beyond individual use of AI, an integrated platform is also essential as an environment in which AI can work for a company to achieve “overall optimisation”.

The company explained that SK AX’s agentic AI platform, “AXgenticWire(엑스젠틱와이어) NPO(New Paradigm for Operation),” can connect many agents and orchestrate collaboration among them while controlling issues such as security, quality variation and rising costs.

Kim said AX is not simply the adoption of technology but means redesigning work methods and corporate operating systems so the entire organisation can move together with AI. He said companies must nurture talent that can collaborate with AI and build an organisational culture and systems that support it before enterprise-wide integration and synergy creation through AI augmentation become possible.

Executives from SK AX’s key customers and partner companies across areas including manufacturing, semiconductors, finance and human resources also shared various cases at the event.

Son Geon-il (손건일), chief customer officer at SK AX, said that looking at the conditions for success based on AX experience with many customers, it is important to redesign existing processes with agent members in mind, turn in-house tacit knowledge into agents as assets, and build success experiences through that. He said this requires efforts that understand current systems and on-site work and reconnect tasks end-to-end through AI technology.

Cha Ji-won (차지원), chief AI innovation officer at SK AX, said the criteria for choosing technology are shifting from the introduction itself to the area of “how to make AI work.” He said that for AI to generate real business performance, a company’s internal data, systems and processes, as well as industry-specific domain knowledge, must be precisely interlinked. He said SK AX is advancing customised execution models for the field through AXgentic Wire.