Naver, Siemens discuss AI collaboration, stress need for wider SME adoption

Choi Soo-yeon, chief executive officer (CEO) of South Korean platform giant Naver Corp., said on Saturday that industrial transformation will reach a turning point when even small businesses can easily harness artificial intelligence (AI).

“AI adoption must extend to small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) and partner companies for individual business gains to translate into greater competitiveness across entire industries,” Choi said, during a discussion with Roland Busch, chairman of Germany’s Siemens Group, at the 19th Asia-Pacific Conference of German Business in Seoul.

Choi also said the growing use of AI would make human judgment increasingly important.

“As AI takes on a wider range of tasks, the role of people in verifying its outputs and making judgments becomes even more important,” she said. “The real measure of successful AI adoption is not only the quality of AI-generated results, but whether they solve problems in the workplace and how effectively the time and resources saved are redirected toward higher-value tasks.”

The two executives also discussed ways to promote innovation in Germany and Korea.

Busch noted that combining Germany’s accumulated engineering expertise with Asia’s rapidly advancing technological capabilities will allow the two regions to usher in a new industrial era together.

Following the discussion, Busch visited Naver’s 1784 headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, accompanied by Siemens Korea CEO Chung Ha-joong and other senior executives.

They also explored opportunities for further cooperation in technologies Naver is developing, including robotics and robotic foundation models.