On the 6th, a day before the world's largest home appliance and IT event, CES 2025, LG Electronics announced its strategic partnership with Microsoft (MS) at the LG World Premiere event held at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, U.S. The company plans to implement AI integrated services by combining data acquired from its various products in homes, vehicles, and commercial spaces with MS's artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
The two companies will collaborate on the development and advancement of AI agents used in various spaces, from homes to vehicles, hotels, and offices. LG Electronics has been applying MS's voice recognition and speech synthesis technologies to its mobile AI home hub (Q9) to facilitate smoother communication with customers. This allows Q9 to recognize various accents, pronunciations, and colloquial expressions. Moreover, the plan is to develop AI agents that not only understand and interact with customers but also predict their needs and preferences in collaboration with MS.
Judson Althoff, Microsoft's executive vice president, introduced by LG Electronics CEO (CEO) Jo Joowan, also revealed plans for collaboration between the two companies in the rapidly growing 'AI data center' sector amid a global AI boom. This is in response to LG's large-scale cooling technology, the 'chiller', and AI data center solutions becoming essential infrastructure for data centers. The companies aim to collaborate on essential technologies, including thermal management and chillers, for next-generation AI data centers being built by MS.
During the opening speech, CEO Jo introduced LG Electronics' AI vision, stating that "a comprehensive experience where products and services are seamlessly consolidated in various everyday spaces is the value customers can derive from AI and what distinguishes it from other AI technologies."
He identified connected devices, capable AI agents, and integrated services as essential elements in realizing this comprehensive experience and outlined the efforts to secure these.
First, connected devices, which serve as the customer touchpoints for AI, are one of LG Electronics' biggest assets. The company possesses hundreds of millions of smart products worldwide. Last year, it acquired the global smart home platform company Athom, further expanding connectivity with over 170 IoT device brands around the world.
The LG Puron, which serves as the brain of the LG AI Home, will further evolve into an AI agent. Based on the large language model (LLM), the generative AI incorporates real-time spatial sensing and individual customer lifestyle pattern data, enabling it to grasp the customer's situation and context in real-time and control devices and services accordingly.
LG Electronics plans to strengthen its AI capabilities not only in the B2C sector but also in the B2B domain. The company is providing new residential experiences with 'smart cottages,' which integrate AI appliances and HVAC technologies, and is applying AI technology to software-defined vehicles (SDVs). In its smart factory business, the company utilizes AI and robotics to offer next-generation manufacturing solutions across various industries, while AI-based thermal management systems and chiller technologies are leveraged to optimize the energy efficiency of AI data centers.