SKT is investing in the AI Contact Center sector to strengthen the competitiveness of its enterprise AI services.

SKT announced on the 21st that it has become the third-largest shareholder of Persona AI, the developer of AICC, by participating as a major strategic investor (SI). Following SKT's establishment of the K-AI Alliance at MWC 23 last February, the alliance now consists of 12 companies, including Moloco, Konan Technologies, Sapion, Cimes, MachinaRocks, and Scatter Lab, with the addition of Persona AI.

AICC stands for AI-based Customer Center. It is a service that applies various AI technologies, such as voice engines, speech recognition, and sentence analysis, to enable 24-hour consultation through AI chatbots and callbots without waiting time to connect with an agent.

Market research firm Allied Market Research projected that the domestic AICC market will grow at an average annual rate of 23.7% and reach approximately 454.6 billion won by 2030. In addition, market research firm Research and Markets predicted that the global AICC market size will grow by 25% annually and reach $36.1 billion (approximately 46.8794 trillion won) by 2025.
Persona AI is a company that developed its own Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine and was the first in Korea to introduce a subscription-based AICC service. Since 2021, it has secured clients primarily in the financial sector for services such as chatbots and callbots required for the AICC business.

Persona AI provides customized AICC solutions and subscription services for corporate clients using optimization technology based on a lightweight natural language processing engine that achieves optimal performance even with limited data. It has also launched a solution (KGPT) for public institutions and enterprises that enhances security when using ChatGPT.

Through this collaboration, we will pursue the development of callbot and chatbot products and joint AICC businesses by combining SKT’s superior Speech-to-Text (STT) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology, known as NUGU, with Persona AI’s natural language processing and generation technologies.

In particular, it combines SKT's consultation history system and agent call distribution system with Persona AI's subscription service. This is being launched as a CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) that allows immediate use of AI customer center functions, and it is expected that small and medium-sized businesses will also reduce their cost burden through the subscription-based AICC service.

SKT plans to strengthen its AICC end-to-end business, which provides the entire process from consulting and infrastructure construction to maintenance services and outsourcing. Moving forward, the two companies will also join forces in areas such as voice recognition kiosks and voice recognition robots utilizing voice AI.
SKT stated, “With global companies such as Amazon, Avaya, Genesys, and 59s also focusing on AICC, telecommunications companies possess wired and wireless communication technologies and can secure large amounts of training data, allowing them to enter the domestic AICC market quickly.”

Lee Kyu-sik, Head of SKT’s AI Contact Business, stated, “With the AICC market growing rapidly, we have gained a great opportunity to partner with an excellent partner like Persona AI.” He added, “Moving forward, we plan to lead the AICC market through joint product launches and proactive technology development with Persona AI, and expand the ecosystem to enable the utilization of voice AI not only in contact centers but also across various industrial sectors.”

Yoo Seung-jae, CEO of Persona AI, said, “Through business cooperation with SKT, a leading AI technology company, we will be able to secure high competitiveness in the expanding AICC market, and furthermore, we want to showcase more of the achievements in the development of Korea’s AI technology.”