Sam Altman, OpenAI chief executive officer (CEO), praised Korea's AI potential, saying, "Korea has all the conditions needed to become a global artificial intelligence (AI) powerhouse."
Altman said in a video message sent to Samsung SDS' "Real Summit 2026," held at COEX in Seoul on the 8th, "With excellent tech talent, world-class infrastructure, strong government support, and a vibrant AI ecosystem, Korea's corporations have an opportunity to show what the next chapter of AI is."
He assessed that AI agents have begun to deliver results as they come into full-fledged use in corporate work. Altman said, "AI enables corporations to actually implement ideas that were once considered difficult to realize," and added, "As corporations more precisely manage what tasks they can assign to AI agents and what roles they will play within corporations, we expect AI's contribution to job performance to accelerate by year-end."
He also said he would help, in cooperation with Samsung Group and Samsung SDS, corporations solve products they have not been able to build due to a lack of resources or time, or tackle issues they have not properly handled. He said, "Together with Samsung SDS, we will support everything from building the infrastructure that underpins AI advancement to helping Korean corporations move beyond simply experimenting with AI to achieving tangible results."
Kim Kyunghun, OpenAI Korea country manager, said in a keynote speech following Altman's video greeting, "Among OpenAI customers, the productivity gap between the top 10% of corporations that use AI deeply and those that do not widened from 2.6 times at the start of the year to 8.6 times as of June," adding, "AI exerts its power only when it is used more frequently and deeply in real work on the ground." In manufacturing as well, the productivity gap between corporations, based on the amount of AI output produced by one employee, reached 5.3 times.
Kim cited "connection" as the first step that creates this productivity gap. He said, "In corporations that use AI deeply, 21% of employees who use AI weekly use AI plugins connected to work systems, but in general corporations this share is only 9%." He added that for OpenAI, the rate is close to 95%.
He also emphasized that management must take the lead in using AI so that corporations do not fall into the "trap of small productivity." The trap of small productivity refers to a phenomenon in which small gains are achieved across various tasks, but these individual gains do not translate into an overall improvement in the corporation's productivity.
Kim recommended redesigning key business processes from start to finish with AI to improve business outcomes to avoid falling into this trap. He said, "One manufacturing corporation redesigned its quotation process with AI, reducing the time required from 6 hours to 20 minutes, and expects an annual $30 million increase in gross profit."
He stressed that after connecting AI to important work and redesigning it, AI agents should be entrusted with actual tasks. For example, Cisco used OpenAI's coding agent "Codex" to increase defect throughput by 15 times compared with before, saving more than 1,500 hours of engineering time per month.
He added, "As of June, a check of the total token output generated by OpenAI customers showed that Codex accounted for 64% of the total, indicating a high share," noting that users and customers using AI agents centered on Codex are increasing.
He went on to say, "OpenAI's latest model released last week, 'GPT-6 Astra,' is a model whose execution capabilities have advanced dramatically."
On the day, Samsung SDS announced it will participate as a pilot partner in OpenAI's cybersecurity program "Daybreak," the first among Korean corporations. Daybreak is a program that automates the entire security process—from vulnerability discovery to verification of real-world impact, risk prioritization, security patch generation, and confirmation of final fixes—using OpenAI's frontier models.
Based on this, Samsung SDS plans to provide an AI security service that covers everything from detecting customers' security vulnerabilities to offering security patch solutions. A Samsung SDS official said, "Through Daybreak, we will go beyond simply finding basic vulnerabilities to verifying real attack feasibility and business impact, helping customers respond quickly starting with the most important risks."