SK Holdings C&C Co. will introduce IBM’s Watson cognitive services in South Korea in partnership with IBM in a bid to expedite the adoption of cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies throughout the country and Asia.

According to SK Holdings C&C Co. on Monday, the two companies signed an agreement to form a strategic alliance to accelerate the development and growth of cognitive computing services in the Asian country on Wednesday (local time) last week at IBM headquarters in New York. SK Holdings C&C CEO Park Jung-ho and David Kenny, IBM Watson’s general manager signed the agreement.

Under the deal, SK Holdings C&C is granted to run IBM Watson in Korea, and both companies will cooperate to create an ecosystem for the nation’s AI industry. This is the second time for the two technology firms to form a strategic partnership after they set up a cloud center in Pangyo in Korea last December.

The U.S. technology giant will launch Korean-language Watson services in Korea in concert with SK Holdings C&C and IBM Korea Inc. early next year. They will develop Korean-based application programming interfaces (APIs) that can enable machine learning-based linguistic analysis, data search, conversation and so on. This includes training Watson to understand and communicate in Korean on diverse platforms including mobile, web and robot.

The two tech firms will also jointly form a multi-million dollar fund to support the growth of the AI industry in Korea.

"This alliance highlights SK’s dedication to growing our artificial intelligence-based data services business, strengthening our AI leadership position, as well as spurring innovation and AI adoption across Korea," said Park Jung-ho, CEO of SK Holdings C&C.

Following the latest deal, IBM’s Watson will be able to process in eight languages -English, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic and Korean.

By Oh Chan-jong

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