▲ Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI at Microsoft, delivers a keynote on “Building Korea’s AI Frontier” at Microsoft AI Tour Seoul.
March 26, 2026 – Microsoft held Microsoft AI Tour Seoul today at COEX, unveiling a success framework for building Korea’s AI frontier and reaffirming its commitment to support organizations through a comprehensive, partnership driven approach.
Microsoft introduced its strategy to accelerate Korea’s Frontier Transformation, going beyond productivity gains to redesign how businesses operate and drive sustainable growth. This approach prioritizes expanding access to intelligence and enables organizations to deliver measurable business outcomes through agent-based AI solutions.
Microsoft also introduced the latest updates to Copilot, with enhanced intelligent agent capabilities. Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot delivers 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, including email, calendars, and documents, and enables users to plan and execute multi step tasks based on users’ goals and work context. The capability is currently available to Frontier program users.
Microsoft also shared global Copilot adoption trends. Copilot is now used by more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies, with paid users increasing by over 160% year over year and daily active users growing tenfold. The number of large-scale deployments with more than 35,000 users has also tripled.
Starting May 1, Microsoft will introduce Microsoft 365 E7 (Frontier Suite), a new integrated enterprise plan that enables organizations to use intelligent agents in a more secure environment. The offering combines Copilot and Agent 365 capabilities with Microsoft’s core security solutions, including Entra, Defender, Intune, and Purview.
During the keynote, Microsoft presented its ‘Frontier Success Framework’, centered on four outcomes: ▲ Enrich employee experiences, ▲ Reinvent customer engagement, ▲ Reshape business processes, and ▲ Bend the curve on innovation. The framework is designed to help organizations move beyond experimentation and deliver real, measurable business value.
Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI at Microsoft, said, “Frontier Transformation goes beyond early-stage 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 support Korean organizations in becoming leaders in AI innovation and trusted frontier companies.”
Willy Cho, the CEO of Microsoft Korea, said, “AI transformation is no longer a question of adoption, but of how to translate it into measurable and meaningful business outcomes. In a rapidly evolving industrial landscape, we hope today’s innovation cases and sessions provide practical insights and inspiration for an execution focused roadmap that helps organizations unlock new business value, improve operational efficiency, and strengthen competitiveness.”
The event featured breakout sessions on agentic AI design and scaling, along with hands-on workshops and interactive experiences. Attendees explored how to apply AI solutions directly to their businesses and deliver real results.
Microsoft also highlighted customer stories aligned with the framework. KT, Hyundai Department Store, Yonsei University Health System, RLWRLD, Hyundai AutoEver and others shared implementation outcomes and operational insights across industries.
▲ Willy Cho, the CEO of Microsoft Korea, delivers a keynote at Microsoft AI Tour Seoul.
Enhancing employee experience: KT drives productivity and efficiency with Copilot
KT adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to turn AI into a core organizational capability. By centralizing internal data and building an integrated environment, the company enabled employees to design and use AI agents tailored to their roles and workflows, fostering an ‘AI prosumer’ ecosystem. These changes have enhanced employee experience and transformed the way work is done, improving both productivity and operational efficiency across the organization.
Hoon-dong Kim, AXD Center Leader and Senior Vice President at KT said, “KT focused on turning individual productivity gains into shared organizational value by enabling employees to design AI agents tailored to their specific roles and workflows. We are seeing tangible results and will continue to manage the lifecycle of Microsoft AI solutions in a more structured way to scale 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 enhanced in store customer experiences with its Azure OpenAI based shopping curation service HEYDI. With contextual recommendations and multilingual support, the solution achieved a customer satisfaction score of 4.51. Monthly AI powered curation interactions increased nearly ninefold, from 9,000 at launch to over 80,000 per month.
Seok-hoon Kim, IT Business HQ Director and CIO at Hyundai Futurenet, said, “As a large-scale offline retail environment serving global customers, we faced operational challenges in delivering consistent experiences to visitors with different languages, intents, and preferences. Since launching HEYDI, we have seen clear results, with visits more frequently leading to purchases and more meaningful customer interactions.”
Reshaping business processes: Yonsei Health System builds clinician led AI development environment with over 80 applications
Yonsei University Health System established a “citizen developer” model that enables clinicians to build AI applications directly, integrating more than 80 specialized apps into clinical workflows. The upcoming Rounding Copilot is expected to significantly reduce chart review time, allowing physicians to secure up to 1.8 additional hours per day for patient care.
Yoon-bin Jung, Associate Director at Yonsei University Health System said, “Strict regulatory and security requirements have made 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 we expect will reduce administrative burden and significantly improve care efficiency.”
Accelerating innovation: RLWRLD advances physical AI and industrial intelligence on Azure
RLWRLD, a physical AI robotics company, is working with Microsoft to advance physical AI technologies, including robot manipulation models. The company has built a data infrastructure based on Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake to systematically store and manage industrial data, improving the efficiency of model training and iteration. Going forward, RLWRLD plans to provide an industrial data sandbox to help enterprises safely validate and adopt physical AI in manufacturing and logistics environments.
Jung-hee Ryu, CEO at RLWRLD, said, “Developing physical AI systems that integrate perception, motion, and control requires high quality manipulation data that reflects real world industrial environments, along with infrastructure that can reliably support its use. Through our partnership with Microsoft, we expect to strengthen the data foundation for manufacturing and logistics environments and gradually expand the validation and deployment of physical AI technologies.”
Korea’s AI developer community surpasses 2.72 million members
Hyundai AutoEver has adopted GitHub Copilot to enhance collaboration across development teams and accelerate development speed. This momentum is reflected in the continued growth of Korea’s developer ecosystem. According to GitHub’s Innovation Graph, the Korean developer community has surpassed 2.72 million, growing steadily since 2020 and expanding its footprint in the global open source and AI development ecosystem.
Microsoft advances a trusted AI ecosystem in Korea through skilling 2 million people and strengthening digital sovereignty
According to the AI Diffusion Report 2025, Korea recorded the highest cumulative AI adoption rate among surveyed countries at 81.4%. More than 30% of the population is already using AI at work, and the country ranks 18th globally in AI adoption, reflecting the strong dynamism of its AI market.
To help translate this momentum into long-term national competitiveness, Microsoft continues to invest in its AI skills initiative, expanding access to learning opportunities and closing the AI skills gap. In 2025, the company worked with more than 30 public, private, and nonprofit partners, including the Ministry of Personnel Management, NIA, and SK Hynix, to help approximately 2 million people in Korea learn about AI.
Microsoft also recently launched Microsoft Elevate in 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 needed to succeed in the AI economy. Microsoft is also supporting regional talent development and inclusion. Through the Busan Datacenter Academy, established with the City of Busan last year, the company is providing practical training and technical education.
These efforts are supported by Microsoft’s broader initiative to protect digital sovereignty. As a founding member of the Trusted Tech Alliance, launched at the Munich Security Conference, Microsoft is working with global partners to uphold five core principles for security and privacy while advancing a trusted digital ecosystem.
###.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) creates platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly, with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.