Organizations must move beyond the (AI adoption) experimentation stage and realize tangible corporate value through it.
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for Microsoft (MS) Cloud and AI institutional sector, said this on Mar. 26 at Microsoft AI Tour Seoul, held at Coex in Samseong-dong, Seoul, proposing a success framework to leap into a frontier corporations leading AI innovation. He drew four key outcomes: strengthening employee experience, innovating customer engagement, redesigning business processes, and accelerating innovation.
MS on the day pledged all-around support based on collaboration to build the AI frontier of Korea. The focus goes beyond simply boosting productivity with AI adoption to redesigning how business is run and achieving sustainable growth.
Guthrie in particular presented expanding access to intelligence as a core task and emphasized that domestic corporations should deliver measurable results through intelligent agent solutions. He said, The frontier transition goes beyond the initial AI adoption stage to create a new level of outcomes and become a key engine for fundamentally redesigning how business is run.
Cho Won-woo, head of Microsoft Korea, also said, The AI transition is no longer about whether to adopt it, but how to tie it to measurable, tangible business outcomes.
He said, Korea's AI market is currently worth $7 billion (about 10.5 trillion won), and added, The AI market is expected to grow more than 30% annually to reach $50 billion (75 trillion won) by 2032.
According to Cho, Korea ranks No. 1 in AI adoption growth rate worldwide, and overall usage is approaching the level of the global top three countries. He explained that about 70% of domestic corporations have adopted or are pursuing adoption of AI, and about 30% of the entire population uses Generative AI. He added, The recent growth rate has risen more than threefold from the previous quarter, and said, This is a top-tier global pace of diffusion. AI is being applied across the entire chain, including research and development, supply chains, production, distribution, and marketing, and it is expanding to agent use that links work data and to price and product optimization.
He added, As of last year, 18% of 1.1 million startups are technology corporations, and about 38% of venture investment is concentrated in AI and bio, strengthening a technology-centered investment flow, and said, Korea ranks around ninth in the world with 14 trillion won in cumulative startup investment over 10 years.
MS said that the share of Fortune 500 corporations that have adopted Copilot has surpassed 90%, the number of paid users is up more than 160% year over year, and daily active users have increased tenfold.
Customer case presentations followed. Kim Hoon-dong, head of the AXD Division, Strategic Business Consulting institutional sector at KT, said, To convert individual productivity gains into shareable, corporation-level value, KT enabled employees to conceive and design AI agents optimized for their specific roles and workflows, and added, Going forward, we will manage the lifecycle of MS AI solutions more systematically and continue converting individual tasks into organizational value. Jeong Yun-bin, deputy director of the Information Services Center at Yonsei Health System, said, Due to stringent medical regulations and security requirements, there had long been many difficulties in terms of time and expense in turning clinical-site needs into AI solutions, and added, In cooperation with MS, we expect to significantly reduce the excessive workload and repetitive routine tasks of medical staff and dramatically improve care efficiency.
MS on the day introduced the latest Copilot updates with enhanced intelligent agent capabilities. Microsoft 365 Wave 3 provides personalized agents that reflect each user's work context within key apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. In particular, Copilot Co-work integrates data across MS365 apps—emails, calendars and documents—when users present goals, and plans and executes multi-step tasks.