South Korean telco giant SK Telecom is making big changes at its recent AI division, AI CIC, just weeks after it was launched. Staff employed by the unit are being offered a voluntary retirement program as a part of a broader effort to bring together the corporate’s various AI-related divisions, SK Telecom confirmed to TechCrunch.
“In late September, SK Telecom announced the launch of the AI CIC (Company-in-Company) unit and confirmed that detailed organizational restructuring could be specified by the top of October,” a spokesperson at SK Telecom told TechCrunch. “This special retirement program is entirely a supportive measure and is just not intended as a restructuring or downsizing measure.”
The voluntary retirement program is not going to involve forced layoffs, and is supposed to support employees whose roles, organizations or work locations may change, the spokesperson said. Employees who opt to stick with the corporate could also be reassigned to regional offices.
Details of the voluntary retirement program have been communicated to staff across all experience levels, including each junior and senior employees, industry sources told TechCrunch. The AI unit has about 1,000 employees, per media reports.
AI CIC is supposed to bring together SK Telecom’s various AI-related units under a centralized organization, per the spokesperson. “This integration involves streamlining overlapping roles and functions, which can inevitably result in changes corresponding to role transitions, organizational realignments, or relocations,” they said.
The brand new division will oversee the event of SK Telecom’s personal AI agent, A. (pronounced “A-dot”), its AI data center operations, enterprise AI business, in addition to global AI partnerships and investments.
Severance packages are reportedly expected to differ based on employees’ tenure and position, however the spokesperson told TechCrunch the corporate has set no such internal targets. “As participation is entirely voluntary, it’s difficult at this stage to predict [how many employees] it could impact on the organization as an entire,” the spokesperson said.
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The restructuring comes as SK Telecom seeks to streamline operations and boost efficiency, with a selected deal with AI. The corporate plans for the AI division to record annual revenue of ₩5 trillion (around $3.5 billion) by 2030, and expects AI-driven B2C and B2B services in addition to related infrastructure to drive that growth.
The telecom giant recently unveiled an AI infrastructure effort, offering Nvidia Blackwell GPUs-as-a-service, and earlier this month partnered with OpenAI to develop AI data centers in southwestern Korea as a part of the ‘Stargate Korea’ initiative.
