"South Korea Needs Strategic Approach to AI Technology Development Competition"

To achieve success in the competition for developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Korean companies need to carefully analyze the AI value chain and strategically select the most efficient investment areas.

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The Korea International Trade Association's International Trade and Commerce Research Institute stated this in its report titled "2024 Global Technology Trend Outlook Worth Noting for Our Companies: AI Implemented Anytime, Anywhere," published on the 17th.

The report analyzed technology trends based on CES 2024, the world's largest consumer electronics and IT exhibition held in Las Vegas, USA, last January. The analysis concluded that "the clear theme of this year is AI."

The report explained that AI is not just an industrial category but a mega trend and a general-purpose technology like electricity, impacting all industries including mobility, sustainability, healthcare, and robotics.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, major global companies have jumped on the AI bandwagon. Recently, "on-device AI," which implements AI directly on devices without going through the cloud or servers, has gained attention. Accordingly, system semiconductor leaders such as Samsung Electronics, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Intel are focusing investments on on-device chipsets, while big tech companies like Google, Microsoft (MS), and Meta have declared the development and production of their own AI semiconductors, marking the beginning of the "AI chipset war."

The report emphasized that for Korea, entering the AI-based technology market, which global big tech companies have preemptively dominated through massive investments, is not easy and requires a strategic approach.

According to the "AI Index" released last year by Stanford University in the United States, Korea ranked 9th globally with $5.6 billion in private AI investment from 2013 to 2022. This is about 44 times smaller than the top-ranked United States, which invested $148.9 billion.

The report advised Korean companies to carefully analyze the AI value chain, select the most efficient investment areas, and develop strategies that create new value by utilizing existing AI technologies and tools available in the market. It also called for expanded public and private investment to cultivate specialized personnel and enhance technological competitiveness in response to the advancement of the AI industry.

Alongside AI, the report highlighted mobility, sustainability, and digital health as key technology trends for this year. In the mobility sector, it predicted that the traditional automotive industry would shift from conventional internal combustion engines and hardware-centric models to software-centric models integrated with AI, and that autonomous trucks would soon be commercialized, causing significant disruptions in the logistics market.

The pursuit of sustainability was analyzed as going beyond mere regulatory compliance to substantially improving human life and linking to corporate profit generation. With the advancement of AI technology, personalized patient care will become possible, and the emergence of solutions to reduce healthcare costs is expected to drive significant growth in the digital health sector.