KT, Upstage join hands in paperless digital transformation biz
Senior Vice President of KT Park Jeong-jun, left, poses with Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon after signing a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in the promotion of digital transformation in the paperless field, at the KT Building in Songpa District, Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of KT
By Kim Jae-heun
KT signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Upstage, a local artificial intelligence (AI) startup, to promote paperless digital transformation (DX) jointly in the B2B sector, the company said Wednesday.
The telecommunications company plans to combine its various paperless services with Upstage's Document AI Pack, an optical character recognition (OCR)-based document processor, to promote DX projects as well as to target related markets.
Using OCR technology, the service converts documents in image or PDF format to text and then extracts and summarizes the content of the required documents using natural language processing technology.
“We will adopt digital transformation throughout the company's whole electronic document managing system in cooperation with Upstage, which is a global-level technology. We will also make more efforts to accelerate digital innovation in the B2B market through diverse collaborations in various industries,” a KT official said.
KT and Upstage will first provide a service that helps B2B customers in the financial, retail, manufacturing and medical sectors to convert their paper documents into electronic form. The two companies also plan to strengthen cloud-based paperless DX solution products, while expanding sales and marketing of AI OCR solutions in the B2B market.
“We are happy to work with KT, one of the country's leading telecommunications companies, to promote B2B business using Upstage's AI OCR technology. We will continue to take the lead in supporting AI innovation of various corporate customers based on the world's best AI technology,” Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon said.
As the disclosure of environmental, social and corporate governance management efforts will become mandatory by 2025, the company is converting paper documents into electronic form, in an effort to minimize paper use.
According to the 2022 Electronic Document Industry Survey by the Korea Internet & Security Agency, sales of electronic document-related businesses amounted to 9.5 trillion won ($7.28 billion) last year, with B2B sales accounting for 73.1 percent.