"By no longer spending time on simple, repetitive tasks, people can focus more on the specialized work that humans should do."
Ryu Dong-yoon, a developer on SK AX's Cloud Platform Team, and Hwang In-sung, an operator on SK AX's Cloud SysOps2 Team, said this in a recent interview with the Seoul Economic Daily about the changes in their work following the adoption of "X-Gentic Wire NPO," an AI agent-based infrastructure operation service. X-Gentic Wire NPO is a service in which AI agents proactively detect and resolve problems that arise during a company's IT operations, reducing response time and costs. SK AX developed it starting last year and officially launched it in April this year.
Generally, in corporate IT infrastructure, failures and changes occur regardless of day, night, or weekend. Operators and developers must be on constant standby to respond to them. When a failure occurs, the person in charge analyzes the cause and scope of impact and prepares a change plan, after which the in-house change management committee reviews and approves it for any omissions before action is taken. Bottlenecks in this process arise in the stages where employees recognize and report the problem, where the person in charge is summoned on a holiday, and where the cause is identified.
X-Gentic Wire NPO is distinctive in that it resolves these bottlenecks by dividing the work previously handled by people into segments that agents can process independently and segments in which people and agents collaborate. Through this, lead time can be shortened by more than 50 percent, according to the two. "Because the workforce needed for infrastructure operation is reduced, there is a cost-saving effect, but what is more important is operational stability, service standardization, and advancement," Hwang said. "Because infrastructure experts can devote time to expert-level work, the quality of service that client companies receive can also improve." Ryu added, "Until now, we did a lot of repetitive and simple work in IT infrastructure operation, and spent a lot of physical time on it. We can hand over many tasks to the AI agents and do other work during that time."
Currently, about 40 companies have adopted and are using X-Gentic Wire NPO. Its scope of application is gradually expanding beyond SK Group affiliates to external companies. Information technology (IT) firms, which well understand how difficult the AI transformation (AX) of infrastructure operation is, are showing strong interest.
SK AX aims to increase the number of AI agents deployed in X-Gentic Wire NPO to about 100. It has currently completed about 40 agents. This year, it plans to expand adoption into finance, gaming, and other sectors to continue raising reliability.
