Brain Commerce has made industrial sites where people and robots work side by side its new business arena. The company plans to deploy robots at workplaces it can already access, accumulate data from them and eventually expand into integrated control solutions that manage both workers and robots.
"AI, robots and people will have no choice but to work together," CEO Hwang Hee-seung said in an interview with the Seoul Economic Daily at the company's headquarters in Seoul's Gangnam district on the 16th. "The key is securing data on how people work and what roles robots should take on, and using that to raise efficiency across site operations."
Brain Commerce reorganized its business structure toward combining robotics with its staffing and subcontracting operations after selling Jobplanet last year. The company judged that demand would grow for robots to fill in on tasks that are difficult or dangerous for people at staffing and subcontracting sites. Hwang expects physical AI to handle a significant share of industrial site work within the next 10 years.
Brain Commerce points to the breadth of industrial sites as its competitive edge. Robot makers that develop a product often struggle to find opportunities to verify its performance across varied working environments, while Brain Commerce can reach about 900 workplaces through its staffing and subcontracting business. "We will identify robots suited to each environment and test them on the basis of that variety of worksites," Hwang said. To that end, he took over as chair of the physical AI council under the Korea Startup Forum earlier this year and is actively pursuing partnerships with robot companies.
The focus in that testing is on gathering data. The company turns not only production processes into data but also how workers move and carry out their tasks. The accumulated data is provided to robot makers for use in product development, and Brain Commerce uses it as a basis for finding and adopting robots suited to each site. "Working from on-site data, I want to serve as a data supplier in the physical AI field," Hwang said.
Over the longer term, the company plans to extend its business into operational control of entire plants. That means going beyond conventional control systems centered on production equipment and lines to integrated management covering both human tasks and robot deployment. "Control systems for production lines are already in place, but operational control that spans the work scope and placement of people and robots is still at an early stage," Hwang said. "Our goal is AI-based integrated control of entire sites where people and robots work together."
