Nol Universe expands AI use companywide as developer output jumps 71%

Nol Universe is accelerating its companywide AI transformation by expanding the use of artificial intelligence across internal operations, including software development.

The travel and leisure platform said Thursday that code output per developer rose 71 percent over the past three months compared with the same period last year.

The time from writing code to deploying it in a live service was cut by more than half. The time to receive an initial approval after peer review fell 41 percent, and the rate of code rewrites for revisions dropped 12 percent.

AI adoption extends beyond the development team. Nol Universe said it is building up use cases tailored to each role across planning, design, quality assurance, operations and business support.

To share AI use cases across the organization, Nol Universe launched an internal AI transformation portal called NOL AX Hub in July. The platform lets employees browse and reuse AI workflows that individual teams had previously developed on their own, and also provides guides and training on AI tools.

One flagship tool is an AI assistant that queries and analyzes aviation source code, databases and application programming interfaces in real time, allowing staff to retrieve information directly without going through a developer.

The company also built a system that uses a large language model to automatically generate phishing simulation templates for employee security drills and automates the training process itself. Nol Universe plans to introduce an Engineering AX Awards program through which employees nominate outstanding AI use cases from across the company.

Nol Universe is also applying AI to customer-facing services. It launched AI Nori, a conversational travel product recommendation service, in December last year, and unveiled an AI curation service called "Balgyeon" in July.

Balgyeon surfaces content by analyzing travel and leisure trends on social media alongside search and booking data and customer reviews on the NOL platform. The service automates everything from image collection and product matching to content writing, and uses customer behavior data to recommend content tailored to individual preferences.

"We are focused on making AI not just a tool for certain teams or roles, but a way of working that every employee uses on a daily basis," said Kim Young-jin, chief technology officer of Nol Universe. "We plan to accumulate the diverse AI experiences and know-how of our employees as company-wide assets, and connect them not only to real gains in productivity but also to service innovation that customers can actually feel."