Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon meets Siemens chairman to discuss industrial AI cooperation

[Financial News] Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon met with Roland Busch, chairman of Germany's Siemens Group, to discuss industrial AI cooperation. The meeting is seen as an effort to combine Germany's industrial engineering capabilities with Naver's AI and digital twin technologies to drive innovation in industrial settings and explore global business opportunities.
According to industry sources on the 2nd, Choi held a discussion with Chairman Busch on industrial AI at the 19th Asia-Pacific German Business Conference (APK), held on Oct. 31 at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas in Seoul's Gangnam District.
Launched in 1986, APK is an economic event co-hosted by the Korean-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KGCCI) and Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE), among others. Government officials from the Asia-Pacific region and executives of global companies gather to discuss industrial cooperation. The discussion was organized to explore opportunities for cooperation based on the two regions' technological strengths, as AI applications expand into physical industrial settings such as manufacturing, energy and mobility.
Choi emphasized that expanding the use of AI in industrial settings requires making the technology easy to adopt not only for large corporations but also for small and medium-sized enterprises and partner companies. “The true AI tipping point in industrial settings will come when even small companies can easily use AI,” she said. “The foundation for AI use must expand to SMEs and partner companies so that the achievements of individual companies can lead to greater productivity and competitiveness across industry as a whole.”
As criteria for assessing the tangible results of AI adoption, Choi cited solving problems in the workplace and improving work efficiency. “The broader the range of tasks AI performs, the more important the role of people in verifying and judging the results becomes,” she said. “The tangible results of AI adoption lie not only in the quality of AI-generated outputs, but also in whether they solve problems in actual workplaces and how much of the time and resources saved through AI are put to more valuable uses.”
Chairman Busch emphasized that industrial AI will deliver value when it is implemented safely and reliably in the workplace and adopted across industry. He said Germany's accumulated engineering expertise and Asia's capacity for technological innovation would be combined to help both regions open a new industrial era together.
After the discussion, Chairman Busch visited Naver 1784 headquarters with senior executives, including Dagmar Mundani, Siemens' head of mergers and acquisitions (M&A); Jeong Ha-jung, CEO of Siemens Korea; and Stephanie Frank, head of Siemens Korea's Digital Industries division. Naver executives, including Choi and Seok Sangok, CEO of NAVER LABS Corp., also attended.
The two companies shared examples of Naver's digital twin technology being applied in real industrial settings and discussed ways to expand its reach into global markets by linking it with Siemens' industrial solutions. They also explored potential cooperation on next-generation technologies Naver is researching and developing, including robotics technology and robot foundation models. Chairman Busch and his delegation toured Naver 1784 headquarters and saw Naver's advanced technologies operating in a real-world environment.
[email protected] Jang Min-kwon Reporter