Data tech company BigValue said on Tuesday it has opened about 5.15 million pages of data in a format AI can read, spanning 20 categories including businesses nationwide, commercial districts and healthcare.

The move is part of the “Wide” track to broaden its data base under its two-track “Deep” and “Wide” strategy that it has pursued since last year.

The company said more people are getting information through AI answers such as ChatGPT instead of search, raising corporate interest in content that AI can read well. It said companies in distribution, commerce and finance, among other fields, are racing to make their information easier for AI to understand, but there is no established, proven methodology and various attempts are under way. BigValue said it leveraged its strengths as a data company by taking an approach in which AI reads the data itself, not products.

The company said that if a user asks ChatGPT something like, “How are cafe sales in Seongsu-dong?”, AI can generate and show an answer based on BigValue data. It also stressed that, based on this, monthly net users of the BigValue website rose to about 180,000 from 974 in just the past three months without spending on advertising, about a 185-fold increase.

BigValue’s strategy is to view AI not simply as a work tool but as the first customer a company must deal with, and to connect demand coming in through AI to its data products and services.

Kureum (구름), BigValue’s chief executive, said, “In an era when AI finds information before people do, how well our data is read by AI is competitiveness.” He added, “We will open BigValue’s vast data wide to AI as the first gateway, and become the company that reaches first whenever data is needed.”