(image: Korea Bizwire)
SEOUL, April 6 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean companies pointed to the difficulty in securing professionals as the biggest hurdle preventing them from adopting artificial intelligence (AI), a local think tank said Monday.
The state-run Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade recently conducted a survey of 283 companies, with 53 percent of them choosing ‘difficulty in hiring talent with adequate skills’ as the biggest hurdle that is preventing them from introducing and using AI.
Following behind were the difficulty in securing funds needed for the use of AI at 32.2 percent, and a shortage of technical factors such as internal equipment and data at 25.1 percent.
For such reasons, the number of companies that have actually introduced AI is quite limited. Among the nation’s 13,255 companies the number of companies that have already introduced AI remains low at 409, according to Statistics Korea.
According to the survey, the amount of AI investment and spending for companies that already introduced AI averaged 8.46 billion won and 5.07 billion won, respectively, in 2019, up 84.2 percent and 476 percent from a year ago.
The share of departments using AI services also increased from 26.1 percent to 36.3 percent. AI services are employed in various fields ranging from automation operation, forecasting and prediction analysis to product and service development.
The number of employees deployed for data-related work averaged 24.5, of which experts with higher than a master’s degree accounted for 68.6 percent or 16.8.
Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)
