▲Im Ha-ni, CEO of Roa Intelligence

Roa Intelligence, DB-ization of advanced industry group companies and markets with AI engine
“Standardized Edge Product Entry Barriers Are High”... Product Exploration and Benchmarking Are Essential

Metaverse is coming to an end and AI is spreading, “Investment is increasing despite economic downturn”

The era of AI proliferation has arrived. Trend-sensitive companies are already quickly applying AI functions to their solutions, and B2B AI solution companies are sparing no effort in advancing AI technology and services. It is essential to diagnose this in the early stages of AI market expansion and find feasible business niches.

We met with CEO Lim Ha-ni, who is at the forefront of industry and market as the CEO of Roa Intelligence, and spoke with her.

He is a veteran consultant who started as an intern at Roa Consulting, the predecessor of Roa Intelligence, and rose to the position of CEO of Roa Intelligence after performing corporate consulting for over 20 years. “There is no such thing as familiarity in a constantly changing market,” he says, introducing himself as someone who is interested in providing business insight through constant market research and exploration.

■ What kind of company is Roa Intelligence?

Founded in 2019, Roa Intelligence collects market information, systematically classifies it, and services it in the Roa.ai domain. Since its establishment, it has been utilizing artificial intelligence engines in business by utilizing natural language processing techniques (NLP), and is creating a database of corporate and market trend information such as △investment △acquisition △listing △service launch △partnership/MOU using artificial intelligence technology.

■ What is the background behind introducing AI into consulting services?

There have been continuous attempts to introduce AI into business since the days of Roa Consulting 10 years ago. However, at the time, the cost of introducing AI was high and the number of related experts was extremely small.

Recently, AI open source has been increasing explosively, and an environment has been created where global technology can be utilized at low cost. We wanted to utilize it to better create a DB on our companies, industries, and markets, and as the utilization of natural language processing technology increases, general services that provide market information and trends have emerged as a core area of business.

■ AI technology-based applications are being commercialized in various fields. In particular, AI SW and AI SW infrastructure solutions such as SaaS and IaaS are growing explosively. What are the trends in the AI service market?

According to Bessemer Venture Partners, a famous American investment firm, AI is expected to have a significant impact not only on sales, human resources, law, and infrastructure, but also on the software supply chain.

By sector, companies that are building infrastructure horizontally include OpenAI, which has recently been in the spotlight, and Anthropic, a conversational AI startup in which Google invested $400 million. In addition, there are generative AI companies such as Midjourney and Inflection AI, which can be considered full-stack vertical companies. In the application layer, Notion and GitHub are using AI functions to strengthen existing services.

There are a lot of articles about AI companies and technology, but it is important to first understand that companies in each sector are not competing on the same level in AI, but rather competing in their respective positions. In addition, as these companies compete by position, the cost of access is reduced.

Recently, in the enterprise sector, security issues for companies due to generative AI have been raised, and the need for private enterprise generative AI solutions is increasing. A market is being formed to prevent corporate information leaks and provide customized AI for each client.

■ What opportunities can domestic fabless companies seek through the advent of the AI era and the chat GPT boom?

In order to compete with global companies, they need to appeal with cost-effective products, but I understand that small and medium-sized companies face many difficulties from the development and testing stages.

It is necessary to set a target company that can be benchmarked and commercialize it to provide a reference to the customer, but realistically, it is difficult to do so with AI server-side products, and it can be said that the possibility is higher at the edge.

When it comes to edge devices, it is difficult to find a niche in standardized products like smartphones, and it seems that we can see potential in wearables, metaverse-related devices such as AR and VR, and healthcare devices such as biometric authentication.

However, even this is currently in a very depressed state. Investment in the metaverse has also decreased significantly, and even when it was popular, it was overused for marketing purposes. There was still potential for edge AI chips in the healthcare sector, focusing on biometric authentication, biometric-based payment and access control, and fitness products, but it is reported that the stock price has fallen significantly and business sales are not going well.

It’s hard to give a definitive answer because I can’t think of a single unique format for an edge device. One product that comes to mind, however, is a smart ring made by Finnish wearable tech company Oura. This is a very rare case that has survived the wearable device boom, and it makes you wonder if there will be a need for ultra-small chips mounted on the edge.

■ Do you think the current AI trend is a sure future?

Artificial intelligence is actually tangible in many cases. There are already so many cases where AI is being utilized in the services we use. This is a technology with an impact that is causing fundamental changes that cannot be compared to the past metaverse boom.

You can tell just by looking at the investment trends. Many investment companies have stopped investing due to the recent economic downturn and interest rate hikes, but AI is still investing. This is a very important signal. When liquidity is high, there may be investments that say, “You should try it too,” but in the current economy, investing is an investment that gathers money that you don’t have and tries to get a foothold in advance.

In addition, companies' effective use of AI technology will play an important role in terms of cost efficiency, improved customer experience, and future competitiveness.

■ Lastly, a word to the e4ds news readers

When providing information that influences corporate decision-making, the source and logic must be clear and provide answers. That is why I think we need to look at the market based on data.

And we need to look at this data from a more holistic perspective. We strive to provide meaningful insights and unbiased information that helps businesses make decisions by providing comparable comparisons to other areas of the business sector.

Our current goal is to further enhance the system and expand the service so that we can view the entire data in the future. We will continue this work this year and continue to enhance the service, so please show us much interest.