SK Telecom buys major stake in AICC developer Persona AI

South Korea's SK Telecom Co. will boost its artificial intelligence (AI) contact center (AICC) unit to emerge as a comprehensive provider of AICC processing services including consulting, infrastructure construction and maintenance. 

The telecom giant on Monday said it acquired the third-largest stake in the domestic AICC developer Persona AI as a strategic investor.

An AICC applies AI technologies to a customer center like voice engine and recognition and sentence analysis, enabling 24-hour consultations through AI chat- and phone bots without waiting to connect to an agent. AI recommends to operators information related to answers to enable quick processing of requests or concerns.

“Persona AI developed its own natural language-processing engine and launched the nation's first subscription-type AICC service,” an SK Telecom source said. “This company has drawn attention in the AICC field with its technological know-how and product competitiveness."

Persona AI conducts AICC projects in finance for companies such as KB Financial Group and Hanwha General Insurance.

Through its partnership with Persona AI, SK Telecom seeks to secure leadership in AI-based customer service in the generative AI era. Both companies will develop phone and chatbot products that combine SK Telecom's NUGU speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies with Persona AI's natural language-processing and generative technology to pursue joint AICC projects.

By combining Persona AI's bots with SK Telecom's systems for consultation history and agent call distribution, the former will start a service that companies can use immediately without the need to build an AICC. Even small and medium businesses, which incur high cost, can easily adopt such subscription-type AICC services.

Through this collaboration, SK Telecom will boost its AICC operations throughout the entire process from sales of solutions to consulting, infrastructure construction, maintenance and business process outsourcing. Both companies will jointly develop new services in areas like voice recognition kiosks and robots using voice AI.

Write to Seung-Woo Lee at leeswoo@hankyung.com