“An employee found the AI; the whole company uses it” ... LG Uplus Corp.’s AX experiment

[Financial News] “I’ve gained confidence that individual employees, too, can achieve artificial intelligence transformation (AX) if they make an effort. Won’t we see more AX going forward?”
In an interview with Financial News on the 29th, Jeong Seong-mo, team leader of LG Uplus Corp.’s AI Technical Support Team, described how his idea led to a change in work practices across the company. The AI meeting-minutes service that Jeong identified and proposed himself was expanded into a companywide work tool after a pilot and evaluation. It is an example of “frontline-led AX,” in which frontline employees find AI tools they need for their work and the company spreads them throughout the organization, moving away from top-down innovation led by a dedicated AI organization.■ A proposal prompted by the burden of compiling meeting minutesLG Uplus Corp. is changing how people work by integrating AI into the workplace. Rather than simply introducing new technology, the company is focused on helping employees identify and use AI services that meet their work needs.
The AI meeting-minutes service Tiro, identified by Jeong, is a prime example. Last year, LG Uplus Corp.’s Enterprise Division identified AX initiatives to support organizations that had difficulty developing AI in-house. “I wasn’t looking for an AI meeting-minutes service from the outset,” Jeong said. “I looked at various products to find an AI software-as-a-service (SaaS) partner that could grow alongside us in a corporate environment.”
The employee’s proposal went through a step-by-step evaluation process before becoming a companywide work tool. After a pilot of about two months in the Enterprise Division starting in May last year, it underwent reviews of access management, security standards and legal matters, among other things. The company then distributed installation and user guides and completed its official rollout within the division in January this year. As requests to use the service came in from other departments, the company decided in August this year to roll it out companywide.
■ The company adds its evaluation and operational framework to frontline proposalsLG Uplus Corp. runs “1 Team, 1 AX,” an initiative in which employees identify tasks in their own work that could be transformed with AI. Before a companywide rollout, the company assesses whether a tool actually improves repetitive tasks and can be used on an ongoing basis across multiple departments. Jeong said that after adopting Tiro, he was able to focus more on meetings and get started on follow-up work sooner. “Once the templates were in place, I had fewer ancillary tasks, such as compiling meeting minutes, and could focus more on the meeting itself,” he said. “Checking the summaries also meant I could get straight to follow-up work.”
Usage metrics after the companywide rollout provided a way to assess whether the service had become established across the organization. According to LG Uplus Corp., of the 1,407 people who accessed the service in September, 90.4% used it for at least 30 minutes during the month. Of the employees who used the meeting-recording feature in August, 85.9% also used the service in September, while usage by organizations outside the Enterprise Division accounted for 44.1%.
[email protected] Yoon Hong-jip Reporter