SK Telecom prepares ‘executive agent’ AI service that provides hospital reservations and public benefit information

Implementation of an executable agent that goes beyond search and performs actual tasks

Information on preemptive public benefits… December commercial service launch

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Park Hyeong-bin = SK Telecom [017670] will launch 'Everyone's AI' at the end of the year, going one step further from the existing service centered on simple questions and answers, and implementing it as an 'executive agent' that performs actual tasks such as hospital reservations and information confirmation.

Kim Ji-hoon, head of SK Telecom's AI business division, revealed the business blueprint in an interview held at SK Telecom's headquarters building on the 14th, saying, "Rather than following ChatGPT's 'deep research' or inference-based answers in the same way, we are more concerned about bringing Koreanized content and public information that domestic users were disappointed with."

◇ From hospital reservations to phone confirmations… ‘AI that runs’ beyond search

The biggest differentiating factor put forth by SKT is ‘execution power.’ The idea is to go beyond retrieving information requested by users and entrust specific tasks to agents to actually complete them.

SKT previously presented a prototype at a government-hosted meeting that links the API of the mobile healthcare platform 'Good Doc' to make hospital reservations and inquire about related information. We plan to provide hospital reservation and review functions by the end of the year.

Phone calls and text messages are also used as major differentiation tools. This is a method where AI directly calls and confirms details such as restaurant room charges, corkage fees, and detailed conditions of use of public facilities, which are difficult to check through online searches.

Public services also plan to differentiate themselves from the existing 'Government 24' and implement a 'visiting service' in which AI understands the user's situation and informs them of the benefits they can receive.

Director Kim explained, “Our long-term goal is to give agents the same level of trust as people would entrust work to others,” adding, “We aim to reach a level where we can entrust everything from simple tasks such as restaurant reservations to sensitive areas such as issuing certificates and civil documents, and even stock investments.”

To this end, SKT has set not only the simple expansion of the number of users but also the actual execution of tasks as key performance indicators (KPI). While the goal is to reach 5 million monthly active users (MAU) this year and 10 million next year, internally, 'reuse rate' and 'execution completion rate' are managed as key indicators.

This means that we will focus on evaluating whether customers who have used the service once return to the service and successfully complete the requested task to the final stage.

◇ Combination of domestically produced AI models by task… December commercial service launch

Regarding the monetization model, Director Kim will avoid charging a fee that increases the burden on users during the initial launch at the end of the year and focus on cost and resource efficiency.

We plan to significantly lower the cost of token (data processing unit) consumption by applying lightweight models and routing (request distribution) and orchestration (coordination between models) technologies that connect lightweight models for simple conversations and high-performance models for difficult tasks.

In addition, rather than relying on one specific AI model, domestic models within the consortium are combined and utilized for each task.

Director Kim added that “one model does not provide the best performance in all workflows,” and that a system is being built to select the optimal model for each task.

As it is an executable AI, securing security and reliability is also a challenge. In the case of sensitive tasks such as personal information or payments, we plan to design it to be carried out with the explicit consent of the user.

'Everyone's AI' will begin a closed beta service in the middle of next month and introduce some functions first, and then officially launch a commercial service in December, reflecting feedback.

Director Kim said, “For the AI ​​economy to grow, there must be a virtuous cycle of supply and demand,” adding, “The entire AI ecosystem can sustainably grow only when AI infrastructure and models are connected to services that customers actually experience, and users continue to use them repeatedly.”