POSCO Group is focusing on strengthening artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across all areas, including product development, production, and management. In a rapidly changing business environment, the entire group of affiliates aims to maintain overwhelming technological competitiveness through AI.
According to the steel industry on the 27th, POSCO Chairman Chang In-hwa held the first communication event of the new year with executives and employees on Jan. 6 and discussed the group's AX strategy and ways to use AI. Chang also personally presided over the technology strategy meeting attended by the heads of major group companies and the group AX meeting with AI executives.
POSCO Group's smart factory, which combines AI technology with its long-accumulated technical expertise and professionalism, was selected as a "lighthouse factory" at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in July 2019. A lighthouse factory is a name given by the World Economic Forum to production facilities that are innovatively leading the future of global manufacturing by actively adopting core technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
POSCO was the first among domestic corporations to be selected as a lighthouse factory. POSCO said its smart factory, which analyzes field experience and knowledge data accumulated over 50 years and trains AI on it, received high marks as an innovative production facility.
POSCO Group's factories are in the stage of evolving into "intelligent factories." An intelligent factory refers to a plant that, through intelligent manufacturing and decision-making, enables low costs and high levels of quality and safety via collaboration among humans, AI, and robots within an AI-based system that spans from orders to production, sales, and marketing.
In particular, POSCO is integrating AI technology into key processes that determine the quality of final products—such as blast furnaces that produce molten iron and technologies that precisely control the surface coating amount of galvanized steel sheets—to increase work efficiency and minimize quality variation.
Beyond minimizing quality variation in the manufacturing process, POSCO is also actively adopting AI technology that detects and analyzes signs of equipment abnormalities in advance and notifies workers, thereby minimizing maintenance time requirements and losses from work stoppages due to equipment failures.
Outside the manufacturing floor, POSCO Group is also applying AI where needed in office tasks such as procurement, marketing, legal affairs, and management support, boosting office efficiency through collaboration between humans and AI. In 2023, it introduced the P-GPT (Private GPT) platform integrated with in-house business systems and has been providing AI services tailored to the characteristics of each job by role.
POSCO Group is encouraging the use of AI and driving companywide participation through various channels such as training and competitions so that employees can quickly improve their related capabilities.
Last year, at the direction of Chairman Chang In-hwa, the company conducted mindset training to lead the AI transition for managers at the executive level and below. It is also providing step-by-step "digital-based work-way transformation (WX)" training for employees according to their respective AI-related skill levels.
At the same time, it is fostering an organizational culture that enables business innovation using AI across fields by running an AI festival open to anyone in the group.
On a one-night, two-day schedule in June last year, POSCO Group held its first "WX Zerothon" competition at the POSCO Talent Academy Songdo Campus. Zerothon, a portmanteau of zero-coding and hackathon, is an event that POSCO Group designed and operates in-house so that anyone can participate without coding, aimed at AI beginners.
A POSCO Group official said, "Through the companywide expansion of intelligent factories, we are securing world-class competitiveness in manufacturing and safety," and added, "We plan to create our own AI models so that humans and AI can collaborate for maximum efficiency and to establish work processes that take into account the core competencies of each group company."