AI-powered 'KDS 2.0' development system takes hold

Token Factory, KT.com among live deployments

Message drafting and review time cut by up to 92%

KT Corp employees use KDS 2.0 and an AI-powered message generation agent to design digital service screens and review customer notification messages. [KT Corp]
KT Corp employees use KDS 2.0 and an AI-powered message generation agent to design digital service screens and review customer notification messages. [KT Corp]

KT Corp is racing to transform customers' lives through AI, targeting its full range of digital services — apps, websites and text messages. The push is expected to unify screen layouts and guidance text that had previously varied by service, while extending AI to design and customer communications work.

KT Corp announced Thursday it has built KDS (KT UX Design System) 2.0, an upgraded user experience design system with enhanced AI capabilities, and has introduced an AI agent that drafts and reviews customer notification messages.

KDS serves as the common standard for screen layouts, design elements and guidance text applied across KT Corp's digital services. Its defining feature is that AI can directly read and use the design guidelines that previously served only as a human reference.

More specifically, KT Corp built "KDS Harness," which allows AI to compose screens according to design standards and check the results. The tool reduces the burden of repetitive design work and revisions during service development and applies consistent screen layouts and user flows across different services.

KDS is already in use across live services. It has been applied to customer-facing platforms including the revamped My KT — relaunched in September — as well as KT.com and Direct Shop, and has also been deployed on Token Factory, the company's AI model platform.

Token Factory in particular combined KDS with a parallel planning, design and development workflow and automated repetitive coding and documentation tasks to boost development efficiency. Work that would have taken about eight months — covering 424 functional requirements, 25 components and roughly 1.1 million lines of code — was completed in 2.4 months, cutting the development timeline by more than five months.

Alongside the design overhaul, KT Corp is also improving how it communicates information to customers.

KT Corp sends about 170 million text messages each month covering billing, service usage and various benefits. To help customers understand the content more easily, the company revised its customer messaging guidelines — its UX writing guide — and replaced difficult telecom jargon with plain language. For example, "prepayment" became "pay in advance," and "metered billing" became "charged for what you use."

KT Corp also officially launched an in-house AI-powered "message generation agent" on Oct. 30. The agent drafts and reviews messages to be sent to customers in line with KT Corp's writing standards and applicable legal requirements. For RCS messages that include images and buttons, it recommends suitable images for the content and supports automatic multilingual translation.

As a result, message drafting and review time dropped from 30 to 60 minutes to about five minutes, while image production was cut from four hours to 15 minutes. Translation work that previously took more than two days now takes just 30 seconds.

KT Corp also plans to unveil a "customer language agent" on Nov. 20. The tool will use AI to review copy used across customer touchpoints — apps, websites and text messages — and replace difficult terms and sentences with clearer, simpler language so customers can quickly find the information they need.

"Customers experience every digital touchpoint — apps, websites, texts and consultations — as a single, unified interaction with KT," said Won Man-ho, head of KT Corp's AX Platform Division. "We will use KDS 2.0 to raise design consistency, and apply AI transformation to customer communications to improve both work productivity and the customer experience."


ko@heraldcorp.com