KT Corporation and Microsoft Announce Multibillion-Dollar AI and Cloud Partnership
SOUTH KOREA and REDMOND, Wash. – KT Corporation and Microsoft Corp. unveiled a five-year, multibillion-dollar partnership on September 29, 2024. This strategic alliance includes substantial investment from KT in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud technologies, and IT business sectors. Microsoft will dedicate significant resources to infrastructure and personnel in support of the partnership. The collaboration aims to accelerate KT’s AI and ICT (AICT) transformation, driving AI service innovation in Korea.
Following an agreement in June, KT and Microsoft have been in ongoing discussions to solidify their cooperation and establish key areas of collaboration. The partnership is poised to make significant advances in five critical areas:
- Developing customized AI solutions for Korea
- Delivering Korean sovereign cloud solutions
- Establishing an AI transformation (AX)-specialized service company
- Advancing AI R&D capabilities across Korea
- Accelerating KT’s AICT transformation
Developing Customized AI Solutions for Korea
KT and Microsoft will engage in engineering collaboration to create a customized version of GPT-4o, and explore developing a customized version of Microsoft’s Phi family of small language models. These models will be enhanced with KT’s extensive high-quality data specific to Korean culture and industries. KT plans to leverage both Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio to develop custom AI agents. These tailored AI agents will be utilized in KT’s internal applications, such as customer service chatbots, and also for building industry-specific, B2B solutions. The goal is to benefit businesses and consumers across various sectors.
KT plans to expand the development and utilization of KT-custom AI agents not only for consumer use cases in education, healthcare, and in-vehicle infotainment, but also for business applications. Importantly, Microsoft and KT will collaborate closely on further evolving KT’s Responsible AI framework to help ensure the delivery of safe AI services for the Korea market.
“We are delighted with the partnership between KT and Microsoft, which presents a valuable opportunity to enhance our digital competitiveness,” said Shinhan Bank, a leading financial group in Korea.
“By utilizing the KT GPT model, specialized in Korean language and financial services, we aim to deliver innovative AI-driven services to the domestic financial consumers.”
Delivering Korean Sovereign Cloud Solutions
KT and Microsoft are working together to develop and launch Secure Public Cloud services. This will be KT’s sovereign cloud solution, built on Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, designed for Korean-regulated industries. Microsoft will support KT in driving its Secure Public Cloud business. This will allow public sector and regulated industry customers to utilize new platform capabilities for safeguarding data and workloads. Additionally, they will have access to the latest cloud and AI features available on Azure, while adhering to local privacy and regulatory requirements.
Accelerating AI Transformation through AX-Specialized Service Company
KT will establish a new AX-specialized service company to assist businesses in Korea in leveraging the latest AI innovations to transform their operations. KT’s new AX-specialized service company will provide expertise in Microsoft Cloud and AI solutions to the Korean market, with plans to expand into broader markets including ASEAN. Microsoft will provide professional consulting resources for the next three years to build core practices and capabilities for the new entity.
Advancing AI R&D Capabilities Across Korea
Microsoft will support KT in setting up a co-innovation center to expedite the development and adoption of Microsoft technology-driven AI in the Korean market. This center will facilitate businesses in developing and prototyping new AI solutions with the help of Microsoft technology and KT’s AI specialists. Furthermore, KT will invest in fostering new AI startups and developing a partner ecosystem to promote nationwide AI transformation. Microsoft will contribute Azure credits and technical expertise to this effort. For future technological collaboration, the research leaders from KT and Microsoft Research (MSR) and business visionaries will explore high-impact research initiatives in network modernization, AI for healthcare, and industry AI adoption, as well as collaborate with leading academic institutions partnering with KT.
Accelerating KT’s AICT Transformation with Organization-Wide Upskilling
KT will modernize existing IT workloads, including mission-critical applications, by migrating them to Microsoft Azure. They will also develop a new data platform and AI services powered by Microsoft Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service. KT will implement Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot for all employees and developers to increase productivity. Microsoft will support KT in equipping over 19,000 employees with cloud and AI skills, and over 5,800 AX specialists will lead a successful transformation through group-wide skilling and co-engineering support.
“The partnership with Microsoft presents a pivotal opportunity, not only for technological collaboration but also for expanding Korea’s AI foundation and driving transformative innovation across industries and daily life,” said KT CEO Young-Shub Kim.
“Leveraging this strategic partnership, we aim to rapidly evolve into an AICT company with unparalleled competitiveness in domestic and global markets.”
“Our strategic partnership brings together KT’s industry expertise with the power of our entire tech stack, from Azure AI to Microsoft 365 Copilot,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft. “Together, we will help accelerate the AI transformation of Korean organizations across the private and public sector and build new AI-powered experiences for millions of consumers.”
About KT Corporation
KT Corporation is a leading company in Korea’s telecommunications and ICT industries. KT is driving evolution into an AICT (AI and ICT) company by building an AX innovation platform based on differentiated AI, Big Data and Cloud competitiveness and offering it with outstanding network infrastructure.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) creates platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly, with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
