[AI, Stronger When Converged] Essential for Innovation Across Society... Creating Demand Is the Challenge

National Digital Transformation Takes Flight with AI

[Asia Economy Reporter Joeslgina] 'It does not stop at artificial intelligence (AI). Now it is AI convergence.'

The government is focusing on creating new value by integrating AI into all industries such as healthcare, welfare, transportation, finance, and environment through the 'AI+X Project,' which is being promoted as part of the 'Data Dam' project, a representative task of the Digital New Deal. This is largely driven by a sense of crisis that the existing methods have reached their limits in solving issues such as declining labor productivity, surging energy consumption, elderly poverty rates, and environmental pollution. AI convergence, called 'AI+X,' is expected to innovate the entire national society by improving productivity and efficiency.

According to McKinsey on the 23rd, the additional economic value generated by AI is estimated to be about $13 trillion globally by 2030. The annual average gross domestic product (GDP) growth with AI adoption showed an additional 1.2 percentage points compared to non-adoption. While the third industrial revolution contributed 0.6% to productivity improvement, the contribution of the fourth industrial revolution, represented by AI, is expected to reach 1.4%.

In particular, the government's goal is to raise productivity by integrating AI into all industries and to solve problems such as environmental pollution, traffic congestion, and aging. As of last year, South Korea's labor productivity ranked only 29th among 36 OECD countries. On the other hand, the elderly poverty rate is ranked first. Energy consumption is increasing by double digits.

The government expects that through AI convergence in the future, the number of deaths from cancer in the medical field can be reduced by 4.6% annually, and healthy life expectancy can be extended by 3 years. In the manufacturing sector, the plan is to reduce product defect rates by 40% while improving efficiency by up to 33%. The accuracy of early dementia diagnosis will be raised from 80% in 2017 to 95%. The crime detection rate also aims to reach 90%.

Currently, seven projects, including illegal replica detection, new infectious disease response, and energy efficiency, are being conducted as leading AI convergence projects and are considered strategic areas with high economic ripple effects and public awareness.

However, a lack of high-quality training data necessary for service development during the AI diffusion process and the fact that the demand market has not yet been formed due to the early stage of the industry are obstacles. While the amount of data is rapidly increasing thanks to various data support projects such as public data opening and big data platforms, data utilization is still limited.

An official from the Ministry of Science and ICT said, "Demand is essential for the growth of AI specialized companies," adding, "Companies also feel the necessity but hesitate to adopt due to costs, application effects, and lack of references." In a previous survey of about 3,000 companies, 35.8% chose AI as the new technology that needs to be adopted.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.