The past year made it much clearer what Korean corporations expect from artificial intelligence (AI). Adoption accelerated when high-level AI carried out real tasks end to end, achieved natural consolidation with existing systems, and operated within the security and controls corporations require.
Kim Kyung-hun, head of OpenAI Korea, said this at a press briefing on the first anniversary of the Korea office, held at the Josun Palace hotel in Gangnam District, Seoul, on the 9th. He explained that Korean corporations' use of AI has entered a phase where it performs core tasks such as research and analysis, software development, and workflow automation, beyond simple assistance. OpenAI plans to speed up its push into the domestic market with its next-generation model "GPT-6 Astra." While pursuing the build-out of a data center in Korea, it will also expand into cybersecurity and advertising.
According to OpenAI, as of the end of last month, users of ChatGPT Enterprise among domestic corporations and institutions increased about 28 times from a year earlier. Users of ChatGPT Work and Codex, AI agent services, also grew 14-fold over the six months since March. This stems from a larger share building "workflow automation" by leveraging the model's agentic capabilities. Codex is OpenAI's coding agent that helps developers write, modify, and review code. ChatGPT Work applies Codex's agent technology to ChatGPT to carry out a variety of tasks.
Kim said, "Whereas corporations in the past used AI to provide internal information in chatbot form, they are now forming teams with AI to create new products and services," and added, "Use of agents is rising quickly even in non-development roles such as legal, finance, HR, accounting, marketing, and sales." Samsung Electronics and Seoul National University are representative examples of expanding AI use across their entire organizations.
OpenAI predicted that the next-generation model "GPT-6 Astra," unveiled on the 4th, will accelerate corporations' workflow automation. Astra improved performance across computer use and professional work, science, coding, and cybersecurity, scoring 99.9 on ARC-AGI-3, which measures abstract reasoning. In particular, it can directly operate even the screens of legacy systems without APIs, allowing the scope of tasks entrusted to AI under human control to expand without rebuilding existing systems.
OpenAI is also expanding domestic infrastructure to ease concerns about corporate customers' data leaving Korea. Currently, eligible ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and API customers can use "data residency" to store customer content in Korea. However, "inference residency," which guarantees that GPU compute generating AI answers occurs in Korea, is not yet offered domestically.
Kim said, "We are continuing discussions with a few partners that can provide infrastructure domestically," and added, "When new GPUs arrive, one of them is expected to allocate part for OpenAI's inference. Once it becomes concrete, we can share timing."
He said domestic inference service may entail additional expense, and that corporations will decide whether to use domestic processing after weighing the need and the cost. He added that discussions are continuing on the Stargate infrastructure collaboration being pursued with Samsung and SK Group, but there is no new schedule to disclose.
He said ChatGPT ads, introduced in Korea in June, are still in an early testing phase. ChatGPT ads are currently being rolled out sequentially to some domestic users. OpenAI formed a dedicated ads team at the Korea office in Aug. and is expanding its business to domestic advertisers and ad agencies. The global ads business reached an annualized revenue of $1 billion before 200 days from launch and secured tens of thousands of advertisers.