Hankook & Group said it will redesign its operations around AI, moving beyond adding standalone tools to enabling frontline employees to remake workflows and build the software they need, the company outlined at Attention 2026 in Seoul.
Kim Sung-jin, executive vice president of Hankook & Group’s Digital Strategy Division and the group’s chief digital officer and chief information officer, delivered the keynote at the industrial AI conference and framed the company’s approach as a response to an “ROI plateau” in corporate AI adoption. He said fewer than 30 percent of companies that have introduced AI have managed to generate real business value, with many organizations still stuck at the proof-of-concept stage.
Kim identified fragmented data across research and development, production, quality control, logistics and finance, together with legacy IT systems that slow planning-to-deployment cycles, as the main obstacles to turning AI investment into tangible business results.
AI-driven business process innovation
Hankook & Group’s answer is what it calls “AI-driven business process innovation”: redesigning workflows from the ground up with AI built in rather than layering features onto existing processes. The foundation of that effort is data integration. The group is building a cloud-based data platform to connect information that has been scattered across its businesses and is establishing a single source of truth, a group-wide standard dataset known internally as SSOT, to reduce inconsistencies between departments.
The company is also changing how employees develop software. Hankook & Group is rolling out what it calls “AI vibe coding,” a practice in which frontline staff create the tools they need by conversing directly with generative AI. Kim contrasted that with the traditional process in which employees compile requirements, hand them off to a development team, and wait through a build-and-validation cycle.
AI in product development and forecasting
Hankook Tire has partnered with MakinaRocks to build a tire pattern generation AI that designers use to produce a wide range of tread pattern options. Engineers evaluate those designs for performance and aesthetics and feed the results back into the development cycle.
The group has also built a proprietary demand-forecasting model that analyzes 17 internal and external variables to project future sales volumes and support supply chain decisions on production and inventory.
Hankook & Group has expanded AI use inside its internal work environment as well. The company relaunched Arena, its group-wide work platform, with an overhaul that added capabilities for automating repetitive tasks and creating personalized work bots for employees, in addition to existing document search and summarization features.
Kim emphasized that the ability to identify which problems need solving will matter more than technical proficiency with AI. “Defining the problem matters more than mastering the technology,” he said, adding that “Enterprise AI innovation going forward will not be the exclusive domain of technology specialists — it will shift toward frontline practitioners who understand the business most deeply and think with the greatest clarity. Combining data, AI and on-the-ground expertise to continuously generate real business results will become the defining competitive advantage for companies.”
Attention 2026, organized by MakinaRocks since 2024, ran under the theme “AI Lands on the Ground” and drew about 1,600 pre-registrations, with more than 800 people attending in person. The conference was held at the Westin Josun Seoul in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.
