- Microsoft holds AI Tour Seoul at COEX, commits to comprehensive support to accelerate frontier transformation of Korean organizations
- With the introduction of the latest updates, including M365 Wave, Copilot has seen a 160% increase in paid users and a 10x increase in active users.
- KT, Hyundai Department Store, and others will introduce innovation examples and present the Frontier Success Framework to drive business value beyond experimentation.
- South Korea has a developer community of over 2.72 million people, reaching approximately 2 million people through AI. Skill up Last year, thanks to cooperation between the public and private sectors,
March 26, 2026 – Microsoft today hosted the Microsoft AI Tour Seoul at COEX, unveiling a successful framework for building Korea’s AI frontier and reaffirming its commitment to supporting organizations through a comprehensive partnership-driven approach.
Microsoft has implemented a strategy to accelerate South Korea’s frontier transformation that goes beyond improving productivity to redesign the way businesses operate and drive sustainable growth. This approach prioritizes expanding access to intelligence and enables organizations to achieve measurable business outcomes through agent-based AI solutions.
Microsoft also introduced a recent update to Copilot with enhanced intelligent agent capabilities. Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot delivers a personalized agent experience powered by Work IQ, enabling Copilot to reflect individual work context across key applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Copilot Cowork further integrates data across Microsoft 365 apps such as email, calendar, and documents, allowing users to plan and execute multi-step tasks based on their goals and work context. This feature is currently available to Frontier program users.
Microsoft also shared global Copilot adoption trends. Copilot is currently used by over 90% of Fortune 500 companies, has grown over 160% year-over-year in paid users, and has seen a 10x increase in daily active users. The number of large-scale deployments with more than 35,000 users has also tripled.
Starting May 1, Microsoft is introducing Microsoft 365 E7 (Frontier Suite), a new integrated enterprise plan that enables organizations to use intelligent agents in a more secure environment. This product combines the power of Copilot and Agent 365 with Microsoft’s core security solutions including Entra, Defender, Intune, and Purview.
During the keynote, Microsoft announced the Frontier Success Framework, which centers around four outcomes: ▲Enhancing the employee experience, ▲Reinventing customer engagement, ▲Reengineering business processes, and ▲Bending the innovation curve. This framework is designed to help organizations move beyond mere experimentation and deliver real, measurable business value.
“Frontier Transformation goes beyond early AI adoption. It enables organizations to achieve new levels of performance and fundamentally redesign how they operate. Through intelligent AI solutions that can reason and create, we will help Korean organizations become leaders in AI innovation and trusted frontier companies,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and AI at Microsoft.
Willy Cho, Microsoft Korea AVP, said, “AI transformation is no longer a question of adoption, but of how to translate AI transformation into measurable and meaningful business outcomes. In a rapidly evolving industrial environment, we hope that today’s innovation cases and sessions will provide practical insights and inspiration for execution-focused roadmaps that will help organizations unlock new business value, improve operational efficiency, and strengthen competitiveness.”
The event featured breakout sessions on designing and scaling agent-based AI, as well as hands-on workshops and interactive experiences. Participants considered how AI solutions can be applied directly to business and deliver real results.
Microsoft also highlighted customer stories that align with the framework. KT, Hyundai Department Store, Yonsei University Medical System, RLWRLD, Hyundai AutoEver, and others shared implementation results and operational insights across the industry.
Improving employee experience: KT improves productivity and efficiency with Copilot
KT adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to turn AI into a core capability of the organization. By centralizing internal data and creating an integrated environment, the company empowered employees to design and use AI agents tailored to their roles and workflows, fostering an “AI prosumer” ecosystem. These changes have improved the employee experience, transformed the way work is done, and increased both productivity and operational efficiency across the organization.
Hoon-dong Kim, AXD Center Leader and Senior Vice President at KT, said, “KT is focused on turning increased individual productivity into shared value for the organization by empowering employees to design AI agents for their specific roles and workflows. We are seeing tangible results and will continue to manage the lifecycle of our Microsoft AI solutions in a more structured way to extend that value across the organization.”
Reinventing customer engagement: Hyundai Department Store scales AI-powered curation to over 80,000 monthly interactions with HEYDI
Hyundai Department Store Group used Azure OpenAI-based shopping curation service HEYDI to enhance its in-store customer experience. With context-sensitive recommendations and multilingual support, this solution achieved a customer satisfaction score of 4.51. AI-powered monthly curation interactions have increased nearly 9x from 9,000 at launch to more than 80,000 each month.
Seok-hoon Kim, Head of IT Business and CIO at Hyundai Futurenet, said, “As a large-scale offline retail environment serving customers around the world, we faced the operational challenge of providing a consistent experience for visitors with different languages, intents, and preferences. Since launching HEYDI, we have seen clear results in increased visit frequency, conversions, and more meaningful customer interactions.”
Reengineering business processes: Yonsei Medical System builds a clinician-driven AI development environment with over 80 applications
Yonsei University Health System has established a “citizen developer” model that allows clinicians to directly build AI applications, integrating more than 80 specialized apps into clinical workflows. The upcoming Rounding Copilot is expected to significantly reduce chart review time, allowing physicians to free up to an additional 1.8 hours per day to care for patients.
“Strict regulatory and security requirements make it difficult to quickly translate clinical needs into AI solutions. Through our collaboration with Microsoft, we are building a secure and scalable development environment, which is expected to reduce administrative burden and significantly improve healthcare efficiency,” said Yunbin Jeong, associate director of Yonsei University Medical System.
Accelerate innovation: RLWRLD advances physical AI and industrial intelligence on Azure
RLWRLD, a physical AI robotics company, is collaborating with Microsoft to advance physical AI technology, including robot interaction models. The company built a data infrastructure based on Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake to systematically store and manage industrial data and improve model training and iteration efficiency. RLWRLD will now offer an industrial data sandbox that allows companies to safely validate and deploy physical AI in manufacturing and logistics environments.
RLWRLD CEO Jung-hee Ryu said, “Developing physical AI systems that integrate perception, motion, and control requires high-quality operational data that reflects real-world industrial environments and an infrastructure that can reliably support their use. Through our partnership with Microsoft, we look forward to strengthening the data foundation of manufacturing and logistics environments and gradually expanding the validation and deployment of physical AI technology.”
Hyundai AutoEver strengthens development cooperation with GitHub Copilot as Korean developer community exceeds 2.72 million people
Hyundai AutoEver adopted GitHub Copilot to increase collaboration among development teams and accelerate development speed. This momentum is reflected in the continued growth of South Korea’s developer ecosystem. According to GitHub’s Innovation Graph, South Korea’s developer community exceeds 2.72 million people and has steadily grown since 2020, expanding its footprint in the global open source and AI development ecosystem.
Microsoft promotes a trusted AI ecosystem in South Korea by upskilling 2 million people and strengthening digital sovereignty
According to the AI Diffusion Report 2025, South Korea recorded the highest cumulative AI adoption rate of 81.4% among the surveyed countries. More than 30% of the population is already using AI at work, and the country ranks 18th in the world in AI adoption, reflecting the strong dynamism of the AI market.
To translate this momentum into long-term national competitiveness, we will continue to invest in AI skills initiatives to expand access to learning opportunities and close the AI skills gap. In 2025, the company worked with more than 30 public, private, and non-profit partners, including the Ministry of Human Resources Management, NIA, and SK Hynix, to help approximately 2 million people in South Korea learn about AI.
Microsoft also recently launched Microsoft Elevate in South Korea, working with educational institutions, workforce development programs, and nonprofit organizations to expand AI capabilities and access. Through this initiative, Microsoft aims to help more people across society gain the skills and resources they need to succeed in the AI economy. Microsoft also supports local talent development and inclusion. The company provides practical training and technical education through the Busan City and Busan Data Center Academy, which it established last year.
These efforts are supported by Microsoft’s broader efforts to protect digital sovereignty. As a founding member of the Trusted Tech Alliance, launched at the Munich Security Conference, Microsoft works with global partners to advance a trusted digital ecosystem while adhering to five core security and privacy principles:
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About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) creates AI-powered platforms and tools to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. With a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, the technology company is committed to making AI widely available and doing it responsibly.
