SK Telecom's T deal sees 81.5% transaction amount increase in H1

South Korea's SK Telecom Co. announced on Monday that the transaction volume of its artificial intelligence (AI)-curated text commerce T deal in the first half of this year reached 106.9 billion won ($80.3 million), marking an 81.5% increase compared to the same period last year.

Since its launch in 2020, T deal's transaction volume has shown a steady progression: 89.4 billion won ($67.5 million) in 2021 and 137.4 billion won ($103.8 million) in 2022. The main reason for this growth lies in the positive response from customers to personalized product recommendations based on big data and AI curation.

Text commerce, which proposes shopping items through text messages to customers, relies on the ability to analyze data to understand customer demands. T deal categorizes customers based on lifestyle and interests, recommending optimal product categories to them through generative AI.

"Through experimenting with AI recommendation methods, we observed an increase in text click-through rates of up to 16% compared to traditional methods," a company source said. "We plan to expand the scope of utilization, including replacing custom marketing phrases written by marketers with generative AI models."

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