Dongwon Group Unveils AI Competition
Showcases New Product Demand Forecasting Models
Chairman Kim Namjung: "AI is Corporate Competitiveness"
From Internal Contest to Nationwide Expansion
Commitment to Fostering AI Talent and Securing National Competitiveness
Aims to Train 800 Data Experts by 2026
"Utilizing AI is the key to enhancing corporate competitiveness. This competition was planned to help secure a national comparative advantage in the AI industry."
On September 30, at the aT Center in Yangjae-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Kim Namjung, Chairman of Dongwon Group, met with reporters at the "2025 Dongwon AI Competition" and stated, "We organized this nationwide AI competition to contribute to strengthening the competitiveness of our companies through the expanded use of AI," adding, "When our companies take an interest in AI and make various attempts, the nation as a whole will also be able to secure related competitiveness."
Dongwon Group held the "2025 Dongwon AI Competition" on the 30th at the aT Center Grand Hall in Yangjae-dong, Seoul. [Photo by Dongwon Group]
"Reading Consumer Minds with AI" Dongwon Group Hosts Nationwide AI Competition
This competition, co-hosted by Dongwon Group and KAIST, was organized under the theme of "Large Language Model (LLM)-Based Persona Generation and New Product Demand Forecasting," based on corporate demand to predict potential customers’ purchase intentions with AI before launching new products. Designed to answer the question, "Will the new product actually sell well before it hits the market?", AI-based new product demand forecasting can serve as a strategic tool in the food industry by reducing the cost of failure and enabling targeted market strategies, thereby accelerating the digital transformation of traditional manufacturing.
In the food industry, "consumer research"-which identifies market and potential customers’ expectations, needs, preferences, and purchase intentions before launching new products-is crucial. Although consumer research is a key tool for responding proactively to market changes and establishing customer-centric strategies, traditional methods such as focus group interviews (FGI), conjoint analysis (to identify which product attributes consumers value), and surveys are costly, time-consuming, and limited in representativeness and scalability.
To address these limitations, this year’s challenge involved generating "virtual consumer personas" with similar characteristics to real customers, based on a variety of big data such as age, gender, income, household type, lifestyle, purchasing habits, dining-out frequency, and purchasing channels. The goal was to continuously ask AI whether these personas would purchase the target product, collect the responses, and thereby improve prediction accuracy. This approach allows AI to create virtual consumers by combining actual data attributes and to assess purchase intent quickly and cost-effectively. In fact, the accuracy of sales forecasts by participating teams exceeded 95%.
Notably, demand forecasting using virtual persona modeling is a first-of-its-kind attempt in Korea, and Dongwon Group plans to apply for a patent for this project. The judging panel included academic experts such as Professors Jung Song, Shim Hyunjung, Kim Kieung, Jang Dongin, and Shin Kijeong from the KAIST Kim Jaechul AI Graduate School, Professor Lee Junhwan from Seoul National University, and Professor Lee Muntae from the University of Illinois, as well as AI experts from PwC, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Samsung SDS.
Dongwon Group held the "2025 Dongwon AI Competition" on the 30th at the aT Center Grand Hall in Yangjae-dong, Seoul. [Photo by Dongwon Group]
From Internal Competition to Nationwide Event... Dongwon Accelerates AI-Centered Management
Dongwon Group has decided to strengthen AI-centered management, believing that innovation through AI can lead to meaningful productivity improvements in its business. In February last year, Dongwon Group introduced its proprietary AI platform, "DongwonGPT," and provided training on using DongwonGPT to approximately 1,500 employees company-wide to enhance their AI capabilities. More recently, the company partnered with AI specialist Databricks to open the "Dongwon CDS Academy," which features a systematic curriculum to foster data analytics experts. Dongwon Group aims to train 800 in-house data experts by 2026.
Additionally, Dongwon Group held the "DongwonGPT Competition," an internal AI contest, last year to encourage all employees to use DongwonGPT and AI and to share innovative achievements. More than 300 departments from over 10 major affiliates, including Dongwon Industries, Dongwon F&B, and Dongwon Systems, participated. Representative projects included an AI voice translation solution for foreign crew members, a construction site risk assessment system, and design creative collaboration initiatives.
Dongwon Group is currently applying the outcomes of the previous competition to actual business operations. A notable example is the multilingual chatbot "Tuna Buddy," developed using GPT, which provides answers to work-related questions in the native languages of multinational crew members from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Although developed based on Korean, it can respond to inquiries in each country’s language via both text and voice messages.
This year’s competition expanded last year’s internal AI contest to the general public, aiming to foster talent and advance technology in the AI sector. Participants worked with real industry data and had the opportunity to develop AI technologies applicable to business settings. Dongwon Group plans to institutionalize both internal and nationwide competitions as annual events moving forward.
Meanwhile, Kim Jaechul, the founder and Honorary Chairman of Dongwon Group, donated 50 billion won of his personal funds to KAIST in 2020 to foster AI talent, in line with his belief that South Korea must secure leadership in AI to become an advanced nation. He made an additional donation of 4.4 billion won earlier this year. Based on Kim’s donations, KAIST established the "KAIST Kim Jaechul AI Graduate School" and is focusing on nurturing talent by assembling a world-class faculty team.
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