Koo Kwang-mo's Vision for AI and Robotics Drives LG Group's Transformation

[Korea Financial Times, Gwak Horyung]

LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo has demonstrated clear competitiveness in AI, one of the three future businesses (AI, biotech, and cleantech) he has prioritized. Market attention is now turning toward "profitable AI." LG CNS, leading with its intelligent assistant "agentic AI," and LG Electronics, which unveiled its "physical AI" robots, are driving up the group's stock prices and positioning themselves for market revaluation.

K-EXAONE Builds Independent AI Ecosystem

The LG AI Research consortium took first place in the first-round evaluation of the independent AI foundation model selection project announced by the Ministry of Science and ICT on the 15th.

Five teams participated in this evaluation, including SK Telecom, Upstage, Naver Cloud, and NC AI. The assessment consisted of a global comprehensive benchmark evaluation (40 points), evaluation by external AI experts from industry, academia, and research institutions (35 points), and user evaluation by AI startup representatives and others (25 points).

LG AI Research received the highest scores across all evaluation categories: 33.6 points in benchmarking, 31.6 points from experts, and 25 points from users. Unlike some companies that received low evaluations for using Chinese open-source technology, LG AI Research's K-EXAONE was praised for completing the entire process from design to pre-training with proprietary technology, simultaneously proving both technological independence and fundamental technological prowess.

LG AI Research was established by LG Chairman Koo Kwang-mo in December 2020 to secure fundamental AI technologies. It is regarded as Chairman Koo's strategic gamble to discover future growth industries amid difficulties in traditional core businesses. In this year's New Year's address video, he emphasized technological competitiveness by including interviews with three external experts in AI and other fields. Chairman Koo stressed, "The technology paradigm and rules of competition are changing, and customer expectations are rising even higher," adding, "We must leap forward with new innovations beyond the success formulas that have worked until now."

LG CNS Leads the Charge with 'Agentic AI'

Following the first-round success of the independent AI project, stock prices of affiliates responsible for AI business within LG Group also rose accordingly.

Korea Financial Times chart recreated as infographic via generative AI

Over the two-day period from the closing price on the 14th to the closing price on the 16th, LG CNS's stock price surged 10%, and holding company LG Corporation rose 5.6%.

In addition, the corporate value of the entire group engaged in AI services or related industries is being revalued, with LG Electronics up 4.7%, LG Display up 3.7%, LG Innotek up 2.9%, and LG Uplus up 2.6%.

LG CNS is participating as a member of LG's AI consortium. As LG Group's IT service company, it operates a platform provision business responsible for overall cloud services to client companies pursuing AI technology adoption. It is also tasked with discovering business models by applying AI technology.

LG Corporation is the company that holds a 100% stake in LG Management Development Institute, which owns LG AI Research.

LG AI Research is led by co-directors Executive Vice President Lee Hong-rak and Managing Director Lim Woo-hyung. They were appointed as successors to Minister Bae Kyoung-hoon, who left for the Ministry of Science and ICT last year. Director Lee Hong-rak is a scholar in machine learning and deep learning who has been selected as one of the world's top 10 AI researchers. He also serves as a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan in the United States. Managing Director Lim Woo-hyung joined LG Electronics Science Park as AI director in 2019 and is described as someone who has led practical AI application research.

Beyond 'Home Appliances' to 'Robot Platform'

The key issue is how to link the AI technology secured in this manner to affiliates operating various businesses. A hint can be found in recent remarks by LG CNS CEO Hyun Shin-kyun. CEO Hyun stated, "We are not making robots, but rather training and controlling robots that have been made so they can work well in specific environments."

The household robot "LG CLOiD" unveiled by LG Electronics at CES 2026 is a good example of such hardware and software integration. According to LG Electronics, CLOiD incorporates self-developed Vision Language Model (VLM) and Vision Language Action (VLA) technologies. Based on a physical AI model, it has been optimized for home robots by training on tens of thousands of hours of household task data.

Parts affiliate LG Innotek is expanding its robotics business. The vision sensing system being developed in collaboration with Hyundai Motor Group's Boston Dynamics last year is expected to enter full-scale mass production this year.

Battery manufacturer LG Energy Solution is also known to be developing batteries for humanoid robots.