LG Uplus, Blumn AI sign MOU for AI customer service

Deal to integrate telecom, contact center, AI and cloud services

Kwon Yong-hyun (left), head of LG Uplus's enterprise division, and Park Jin-young, co-CEO of Blumn AI, pose for a photo at the MOU signing ceremony. [LG Uplus]
Kwon Yong-hyun (left), head of LG Uplus's enterprise division, and Park Jin-young, co-CEO of Blumn AI, pose for a photo at the MOU signing ceremony. [LG Uplus]

LG Uplus will help small and midsize businesses adopt AI technology in their customer service centers.

LG Uplus said Wednesday it signed a strategic MOU with Blumn AI, a company specializing in AI-powered customer consultation and customer relationship management, on Tuesday. The signing ceremony was held at LG Uplus's Yongsan headquarters in Seoul. Kwon Yong-hyun, executive vice president and head of LG Uplus's enterprise division, and Park Jin-young, co-CEO of Blumn AI, attended.

Under the agreement, the two companies plan to combine LG Uplus's telecommunications infrastructure and AI contact center technology with Blumn AI's AI consultation platform and customer management solutions.

Blumn AI currently serves more than 40,000 small and midsize business clients, offering services including HappyTalk, CallBridge, Luna M Kakao Notification Talk and SmartMessage Plus.

LG Uplus plans to integrate AI technologies — including speech-to-text, large language models and text-to-speech — into Blumn AI's core services. The companies will also provide end-to-end integrated services so that corporate clients can efficiently manage consultation, customer relations and marketing without building separate systems.

LG Uplus said that while corporate adoption of AI contact centers has been accelerating, small and midsize businesses in particular have struggled with the transition. Those companies face significant hurdles including setup costs, staffing requirements and technical barriers.

LG Uplus expects the partnership to lower the initial deployment burden for small and midsize business clients, making AI contact center services easier to adopt.

The two companies will also expand collaboration on customer management. A key initiative involves integrating LG Uplus's next-generation messaging service, RCS, with Blumn AI's SmartMessage Plus platform, enabling corporate clients to communicate more effectively with their customers across multiple channels.

The partnership will also draw on LG Uplus's sovereign cloud to strengthen security and ensure stable service operations. The companies plan to incorporate generative AI technologies — including EXAONE from LG AI Research — and to utilize LG Uplus's enterprise AI platform, ixi Enterprise, to develop more advanced, personalized AI services and sharpen their competitive edge.

In particular, the two companies will pursue development of "agentic AI" capable of autonomously handling a range of business tasks using ixi Enterprise. The platform is a B2B AI transformation platform that can securely connect a company's internal data and systems.

"Corporate clients will be able to integrate and use core functions — including AI consultation, customer management and marketing — without building separate systems," Kwon said. "We will continue to expand AI-based customer communication services to companies across a wide range of industries."

"Through this partnership, we will work to make it easier and more efficient for more small and midsize businesses to use AI customer center services," Park said. "We will do our best to combine the two companies' technologies so that workers can feel a real improvement in operational efficiency."


chami@heraldcorp.com