Alice Chambers |
KT, a south Korean telecommunications company, has signed a five-year, multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft to develop artificial intelligence and cloud solutions for more than 650,000 businesses and 17 million customers in Korea.
The deal was agreed in September, following an initial meeting between the companies’ CEOs - Young-Shub Kim and Satya Nadella – in June 2024.
First, KT will migrate its existing IT workloads to Microsoft Azure. This includes rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot to all its employees and developers, and training 19,000 of its employees with cloud and AI skills. It will then use Microsoft technology such as Microsoft Fabric and Azure Open AI Service to develop customised versions of Chat GPT-4o and Microsoft’s Phi family of small language models for internal and customer-facing applications such as customer service chatbots.
The partnership will also develop secure public cloud services, built on Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, to help Korean-regulated industries comply with privacy and regulatory requirements.
Read more about Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty: Microsoft’s Kathleen Mitford and Satish Thomas explain how the platform helps organisations to accelerate digital transformation while prioritising regulatory compliance and data security
KT will also establish a new AI transformation-specialised service company – with the aim of helping businesses in Korea to take part in AI innovation by leveraging Microsoft Cloud and AI solutions – and develop a co-innovation centre to accelerate AI transformation with Microsoft technology in Korea.
“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 organisations across the private and public sector and build new AI-powered experiences for millions of consumers.”