HS Ad: 'We built the instincts of ad professionals into our AI'

"When we started our AI transformation, the question we wrestled with most was: why should our company use an in-house AI agent instead of just ChatGPT?"

Before launching its full-scale AI transformation, the AI strategy team at HS Ad — the advertising arm of LG Group — asked itself what would set its AI apart from ChatGPT. The answer was an AI agent platform called "Brand Agent," built specifically for the advertising industry, where instinct and experience matter most.

Kim Hyun-ju, head of the AI strategy team at HS Ad, sat down for an interview on June 9 and explained the thinking behind the project. "Simply connecting external AI tools to auto-generate outputs didn't feel meaningfully different from ChatGPT," she said. "Because we are a company built on the expertise of advertising professionals, we believed it was essential to transplant their tacit knowledge — their mental models — into the AI in an explicit, structured form."

Kim cited the direct collection and training of "consumer AI utterance data" as Brand Agent's biggest competitive edge. "In the generative AI era, consumers express their genuine opinions in AI search interfaces like ChatGPT," she said. "We had a panel of about 250 people engage in free-form, 30-minute conversations with an AI chatbot about specific brands, then collected what they said and used it to train the model."

That approach has sharply improved efficiency on the advertising planning floor, Kim said. "We gained a much deeper understanding of consumer purchase intent and were able to gauge overall market demand, including competitors," she said. "In the past, commissioning an outside research firm and waiting for an analysis report took at least a month. Now two weeks is enough."

The agent also generates sample ad copy and images tailored to the mood a user wants. "Rather than mechanically training the AI on copy itself, we are converting the know-how of advertising professionals into structured knowledge and feeding that to the AI," Kim said. "For example, we collect sentences from interviews with copywriters who have worked on LG Electronics accounts for years and transplant that knowledge directly into the system."

In addition, HS Ad has built a "work support agent" feature that lets employees create their own customized AI agents. Designed for advertising professionals who are not comfortable with coding, the system requires no coding at all — users simply type instructions in natural language and an AI agent is ready in about 10 minutes. "In the first month after launch, employees had built more than 800 agents, and the number of tokens used in that single month alone reached about 500 million," Kim said.

HS Ad's AI transformation is advancing on the back of Dataiku's AI platform. Kim named "unstructured data analysis" and "technology independence" as the key reasons for choosing Dataiku. "Advertising companies inherently need an environment for processing unstructured text data, and Dataiku not only provided that but also supported agent creation, which made it very attractive," she said. "Rather than building our own system from scratch, we chose to use Dataiku's flexible platform to avoid technology lock-in and improve operational efficiency."