[Anchor]

From industries to our daily lives, the biggest topic of our time is undoubtedly AI. Google is one of the leading companies at the forefront of the AI industry.

Reporter Park Jae-hyun met with Kim Kyoung-hoon, President of Google Korea, to hear his thoughts.

[Reporter]

Q1. What is the biggest change in the "AI era"?

Personally, I think AI has become a partner that is incredibly useful in every aspect, whether it is personal or professional, and it is now a tool that is inseparable from our daily lives. If the first stage was an efficiency-centered approach, asking how we can save costs or time, the next stage is about how AI can help humans do their jobs better, acting as an auxiliary function. In the final stage, AI can perform tasks that humans cannot. Because it handles calculations or analyses that would otherwise require immense time and cost, the third stage is not just about AI doing auxiliary work, but about sharing the workload with humans. Korean companies are currently navigating these stages very well.

Q2. What are the benefits that companies will enjoy from AI?

AI digitizes the knowledge held by experts in each field, analyzes that data, and then acts as a companion for everyone working in their respective roles. It writes reports for those who need them, performs analyses for those who require them, and furthermore, one of the great advantages of AI is that in the past, such tasks required experts—people who knew how to use these techniques, statisticians, data scientists, or those well-versed in software. Now, they receive this almost in real-time. This is immense power. If leading companies in Korea are actively utilizing these tools, it does not just mean doing more work with fewer people, but exponentially increasing the amount of work that can be done with existing resources.

Q3. What is the greatest strength of Google's AI?

First, to excel in AI, you need various elemental technologies and assets. Even HBM, which is very hot in Korea right now, requires AI-specific chips like GPUs or TPUs. We have our own chips called TPUs, we build our own data centers, and we even construct the undersea cables that go into those data centers. Starting from there, we have the basic research and development capabilities—we have 8,000 researchers at DeepMind who can build models well. Then, there is the infrastructure to actually implement it, which is the infrastructure Google Cloud possesses. On top of that, services like Gemini, Gemini Enterprise, Gmail, and YouTube all incorporate AI. Therefore, I believe we will continue to create services that corporate and individual consumers prefer and want. Another point is that we think deeply about the various impacts AI can have on society, both positive and negative, and we are striving to develop it in a way that minimizes side effects and harms.

Q4. What will the future of AI look like?

Although it has been a short time, you can see that people were initially enthusiastic about chatbots—the LLMs—saying, "Wow, this is amazing," as it understood natural language and was so knowledgeable. Now, it has entered the physical realm. We have seen areas like physical AI and robotics, which Korea is doing very well in. There are various fields for how robots will be used, from robots used in manufacturing processes to those acting as caregivers. Since we are still in the nascent stage, I believe this core competency will permeate every aspect of life, and I think new business items that we cannot even imagine right now will emerge.

(Video reporting: Park Hyun-chul, Video editing: Yoon Tae-ho)