Movie Ticket Booking Agent to End on July 9
Focusing on Core Services Like LLM Agents
A.Dot to Launch Paid Service Within This Year
SK Telecom is withdrawing low-usage services from its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant application ‘A.Dot’ and adding new AI models. This move aims to clarify A.Dot’s identity as an AI assistant and enhance its performance, in anticipation of monetizing the service.
According to the telecommunications industry on the 16th, SKT will terminate the movie ticket booking agent within A.Dot starting from the 9th of next month. Until now, users could run A.Dot and select movies and theaters conversationally to book tickets, but due to lower-than-expected user numbers, the service will be discontinued.
An SKT official stated, "To reorganize A.Dot focusing on features that users frequently use, in line with its purpose as an AI assistant service, we decided to end the movie ticket booking function," adding, "All personal information related to the movie ticket booking service will also be deleted." Prior to movie ticket booking, SK Telecom had successively discontinued routine functions that automatically execute features according to time, as well as tarot and psychological tests, games, and character store functions.
Instead, SKT is restructuring A.Dot to enhance its performance as an AI assistant. New models are being continuously added to A.Dot’s multi large language model (LLM) system. Earlier this month, the ‘Sona Pro’ model from Perplexity, capable of providing in-depth answers to complex questions, and OpenAI’s latest inference model ‘o3-mini’ were added. Currently, SKT’s own LLM, A.Dot X (A.X), along with five OpenAI models, three Anthropic (Claude) models, and two Perplexity models, are all available simultaneously.
There is also growing interest in whether the termination of such non-core services and the strengthening of AI agents will lead to monetization of A.Dot. Kim Ji-hoon, head of SKT’s AI Business Strategy Division, said during a conference call last month, "We are considering subscription-type products related to A.Dot’s monetization model." Some services are also showing signs of preparing for monetization. Since early this year, SKT has reduced the default number of call summaries via A.Dot phone to 30 times. Currently, through promotions, additional call summary counts are provided when visiting the A.Dot app or web page.
Meanwhile, A.Dot is gaining a loyal user base and standing out in the AI agent market dominated by foreign services. According to IGAWorks Mobile Index, A.Dot recorded approximately 1.55 million monthly active users (MAU) last month. This is the second highest number among AI apps during the same period, following ChatGPT with 3.87 million users.
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