SK Telecom CEO says AI era demands insight and empathy over technical skills

SK Telecom CEO Jung Jae-hun took the podium at Seoul National University on Tuesday to argue that the AI era calls for talent defined not by technical prowess but by insight, empathy and deep domain expertise.

SK Telecom said Jung delivered a special lecture titled "Choices and Opportunities in the AI Era" to about 300 undergraduate and graduate students at the university's Engineering Building No. 1 on Tuesday.

The lecture marked the first class of an AI joint program that SK Telecom and Seoul National University have run together for a decade. Jung, who enrolled in the university's public law program in 1987, returned to his alma mater as a speaker for the first time in roughly 40 years.

"I did not come today to teach technology," Jung told the audience. "I came to share what one company at the forefront of the AI transition is grappling with right now."

Jung said AI has transformed the density of time itself — for some people, he noted, a single day now effectively stretches to 240 or even 2,400 hours — and that this shift is dismantling principles once taken for granted. He pointed to the speed of AI's spread as evidence: it took automobiles more than 60 years to reach mass adoption and mobile phones more than a decade, but ChatGPT surpassed 50 million users in a single month.

Jung said AI, like oil and semiconductors before it, has escalated from corporate competition into a contest between nations, and stressed the importance of "sovereign AI." Relying on another country's technology, he said, means losing control over pricing and terms.

Drawing on a year of leading SK Telecom's own AI transformation, Jung introduced what he called the "J-curve of AX" and outlined three working principles for the AI transformation era: "seeing with fresh eyes," "confronting extremes" and "embracing discomfort."

Adopting AI does not immediately boost efficiency, Jung explained. Retraining, workflow redesign and data and organizational restructuring create a lag between technological change and productivity gains, meaning output can actually fall in the early stages. Organizations that endure this slump, he said, eventually see productivity rise sharply. Jung described this initial inefficiency as the "valley of discomfort" and said pushing through it is essential.

"Seeing with fresh eyes" means questioning assumptions long taken for granted in order to find new possibilities, while "confronting extremes" means setting targets that cannot be reached by conventional methods and pursuing them anyway. Jung cited SK Telecom's development of A.X K2 — a proprietary large-scale AI model with 688 billion parameters — built despite limited GPU resources.

"Embracing discomfort" means pushing through the friction of the early AI transition. Jung offered a concrete example from within SK Telecom: one developer initially spent more than 500 hours using AI to complete a system modification task that had previously taken 50 hours — but now handles the same work in one hour.

"It may feel like an era where AI decides everything, but I don't see it that way," Jung said. "Insight and empathy — the ability to set your own direction with initiative — are what give you a competitive edge." He added that building deep expertise in one's own domain and using AI to maximize productivity is critical, and advised students that connecting technology, industry and people across domain boundaries is where new opportunities emerge.

Jung also introduced the four qualities of AI-era talent outlined by SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won: "thinking muscle," "adaptation muscle," "empathy muscle" and "physical intelligence."

"None of the four is about coding ability," Jung said. "Because AI will keep getting better at technical tasks, the muscles only humans possess become the defining qualities of talent." He added that "judging and deciding what has value will remain a human responsibility to the end."

"Ten years ago we asked whether AI could surpass humans," he said. "Today we are asking what we will build with AI. I look forward to meeting you again as colleagues on the front lines of AI innovation — as the people who will answer that question over the next ten years."