SK Telecom (CEO Yoo Young-sang) is actively strengthening its employees' artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to become a global AI company.

SKT announced on the 29th that it will fully implement an AI literacy capacity building program for all employees.

This AI literacy (the ability to understand and utilize AI) capacity building program reflects CEO Yoo Young-sang's strong will that all employees must become protagonists leading the AI transition in order for SKT to evolve into a global AI company.

SKT has established a new AI education program consisting of three levels: Basic & Intermediate, Advanced, and Market Top, taking into account the job duties and capabilities of its members.

In the Basic & Intermediate stages, you will receive training that will help you understand key generative AI concepts and develop the ability to utilize generative AI in your daily work.

The Basic Level, open to all members, covers the fundamental theories of key generative AI technologies. Building on this foundation, the Intermediate Level provides students with a thorough understanding of how to use various AI programs and explores ways to automate repetitive, everyday tasks to improve work efficiency.

In the advanced stage, you will receive training on how to transform your business model by utilizing AI in earnest. For example, we are integrating AI into marketing and customer service centers, such as contact centers (AICC), and developing capabilities to utilize AI in market analysis and drafting business plans.

The MarketTop stage is a training program for AI developers. To ensure SKT developers maintain industry-leading capabilities, the program focuses on learning pre-commercial algorithms based on the latest AI research and implementing the technology.

In particular, the MarketTop course will also operate technical seminars to share AI technologies and strategies in collaboration with global partners such as Antropic, OpenAI, and Google, to help developers maintain global top-level AI capabilities.

SKT conducted a separate training program for team leaders across the company, introducing specific examples and methods for utilizing AI in team work and encouraging all members to actively participate in AI literacy training.

Members who learned Excel automation, proposal writing, and business planning using the intermediate-level generative AI responded that it was helpful for their actual work, with over 90% being satisfied, and the waiting list for the course is over 200 people, showing great interest.

To foster a culture of continuous improvement in AI literacy, SKT operates a hackathon-style challenge and reward program that goes beyond education. A hackathon to develop AI services applicable to SKT's services and work processes will be held later this year. Additionally, by 2024, we plan to introduce a level-based certification system to measure our employees' AI literacy capabilities, and provide proactive company-level rewards based on their level of skill improvement.

Ahn Jung-hwan, head of SKT’s corporate culture, said, “For SKT to leap forward as a global AI company, AI literacy among our members is an essential quality and capability,” and added, “We will continue to do our best to enhance SKT’s AI capabilities through various educational programs and reward systems.”