AI wraps up a day's work in 20 minutes at SK Telecom

At 8:40 a.m. Wednesday on the second basement floor of SKT Tower, employees were given a challenge: find a commercialization strategy for a fictional deep-sea species called "Cheongram Signal Whale" — a scenario designed to simulate a new SK Telecom business push. Hands moved quickly across keyboards.

There was no small talk with the colleague in the next seat. No notebooks or pens sat on the tables — only laptops. Employees pulled up large language models including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude on their screens, attaching URLs and reference materials to their prompts.

"I uploaded three URLs to ChatGPT, fed it all the responses, and then told it: 'Everything you need to solve this problem is in the URLs, and the answers are below — find them and fill in the responses,'" one participant said, describing how they structured the text and outputs.

A single sentence fed into an LLM dramatically reduced the human burden of sifting through an overflow of data, juggling variables and handling unexpected complications.

By 8:56 a.m. — less than 20 minutes after opening a laptop and launching an AI tool — participants had their answers. Under conventional work methods, the same task would have taken a full day.

The scene unfolded Wednesday at SKT Tower in Jung-gu, Seoul, during a session of the company's in-house AI capability program, EBB AX Club, offering a glimpse of how AI is reshaping the SK Telecom office.

EBB AX Club is a program SK Telecom runs to help employees build practical AI skills. Participants use AI tools to tackle assignments modeled on real workplace situations.

The response has been strong. Since its launch in March, the program has run eight sessions through May, drawing an average of 30 participants per session and 220 in total. Wednesday's session alone drew 84 attendees — 34 in person and 50 online.

As AI transformation, or AX, ecosystem-building has become a central corporate priority, EBB AX Club has served as a starting point for employees integrating AI into their daily work.

Much of the participants' effort went into identifying the right LLM for each task, since different models produce different results.

Many employees supplemented the ChatGPT Enterprise accounts provided by SK Telecom with personal subscriptions to Gemini, Claude and other tools.

In one case, Gemini failed to produce a useful answer because the URLs in the assignment were sample pages created by SK Telecom's development team solely for the exercise. ChatGPT, by contrast, ran its own web search and arrived at the correct response.

Kim Su-ji, a manager on the Growth team within the management strategy division and a non-developer participant, said she ran three LLMs simultaneously on a single query. "I gather all the materials I need, then ask the models to work through them along with the URLs," she said. "For today's task, ChatGPT was the most useful — Claude didn't really come through."

What employees learn in the program feeds directly back into their jobs. Presentation decks, meeting transcription and real-time note-taking, earnings tracking and routine administrative tasks are all now handled through AI.

Choi Mok-won, a manager on T Service Planning Team 2, said his unit falls under an AT/DT planning division, so everyone is eager to adopt AI. "One team member builds all presentation materials entirely in Claude and feeds meeting recordings straight into AI for real-time summaries," he said. "The regional marketing division is going through dealer earnings management one by one and applying AX to each."

Kim added that in the management strategy division alone — which has more than 50 staff — the more proficient colleagues cross-validate results by moving between LLMs and multiple other tools. "People end up focusing more on the thinking work: looking at something from a different angle, or catching when AI got something wrong," she said. "The mood is to hand off repetitive tasks to AI, and the push has gotten much stronger this year."