A domestic research team has decided to actively support customer consultations using artificial intelligence technology. This will help counselors' work and significantly improve the quality of customer consultations, enabling them to provide consultations tailored to the customer's needs and realize value.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced at the end of last month that it had agreed to collaborate with F&U Credit Information Co., Ltd., a customer management specialist, to develop AI technology for next-generation consulting support.

ETRI explained that the two organizations agreed that cooperation is essential to take the lead in the rapidly growing domestic artificial intelligence contact center (AICC) market.

ETRI said it expects a synergy effect from technological cooperation as the cutting-edge AI technology it possesses and F&U Credit Information Co., Ltd.'s diverse financial consulting expertise come together.

Counseling support AI technology focuses on four key areas: counseling summary, counseling classification, counseling evaluation, and augmented search generation (RAG)-based knowledge provision.

Through this, the two organizations will collaborate to develop AI-based counseling support technology that can revolutionize the counseling environment.

For example, when a customer seeks financial advice, AI technology supporting consultations in four key areas is expected to enable more effective and systematic consultations.

In this way, the scope of customer service can be expanded to various fields beyond finance.

Additionally, the research team explained that counselors will be able to quickly and accurately explain specific cases and content that fit the user's counseling purpose.

F&U Credit Information Co., Ltd. builds and provides data necessary for learning and evaluation based on its diverse financial consulting know-how from actual fields, and ETRI develops consulting support technology using cutting-edge AI technology based on the data built by F&U Credit Information Co., Ltd.

This year, we will conduct a proof of concept (PoC) for technology verification, and in the future, we will internalize and commercialize the technology through technology transfer through mutual agreement. We plan to cooperate toward this goal.

ETRI possesses AI source technology that can solve complex problems entered by users and explain them in a way that even the general public can easily understand, such as the basis for judgment and the truth of the matter.

The research team plans to develop next-generation consulting support technology to improve the work efficiency and strengthen the capabilities of professional counselors by leveraging cutting-edge AI core technologies accumulated over many years.

ETRI Language Intelligence Lab Director Kwon Oh-wook said, “Through this collaboration between institutions, the research institute’s explainable artificial intelligence source technology will be utilized to efficiently assist professional counselors in their counseling work.”

Han Ki-wook, Head of Management Support at F&U Credit Information Co., Ltd., also stated, "Our goal is to provide even higher-quality BPO services through the AICC. We hope to achieve even more efficient service delivery through the collaboration between our consultants and the AICC."

The research team expects that this collaboration between the two institutions will contribute to building a super-intelligent information society where humans coexist with AI while minimizing the side effects of AI.

Allied Market Research, a global research firm, projects that the domestic artificial intelligence contact center (AICC) market size will reach $42.14 million in 2020 and $350 million by 2030 (CAGR 23.7%).

This collaboration was carried out based on the results of the ‘Development of Explainable Expert Decision Support Artificial Intelligence Technology’ project of the ‘Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Core Source Technology Development Project’ supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Institute for Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP).