LG Uplus CEO Hwang Hyeon-sik speaks at the "2024 LG Uplus AI Visionaries Summit" held at the Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley in San Francisco on Saturday. (LG Uplus)

LG Uplus CEO Hwang Hyeon-sik traveled to Silicon Valley and hosted a special event to lure young talents in the field of artificial intelligence, the telecom carrier said Monday.

Hwang hosted the “2024 LG Uplus AI Visionaries Summit" at the Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley in San Francisco on Saturday. Invited were some 10 doctoral candidates and master's students in key AI fields such as natural language processing, large language model and vision from major US universities, including Stanford University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois.

The list of guests was chosen when LG Uplus conducted US campus recruiting earlier this year. Back in January, it discovered talent with research expertise in fields highly related to the AI transformation project that the company promoted.

While key executives of LG Uplus, including Chief Data Officer Hwang Gyu-byeol and Chief Strategy Officer Kim Ji-hoon attended the Saturday event, the CEO shared his future vision for AI to the young talent.

“LG Uplus has a dream to become a digital innovation platform company that leads changes in customers’ daily lives,” he said. “We believe the most important thing is AI technology that will make customer experience a reality, and above all, people who can make that technology bloom to realize this goal.”

Hwang also asked the young talent to create a future together where AI permeates customers’ daily lives by combining their dreams with LG Uplus’ business goal.

According to the telecom company, some of the event attendees responded positively and showed high expectations toward LG Uplus’ vision. One of the attendees said, “There seems to be a wealth of data that can be utilized for AI technology.”

During his five-day trip to Silicon Valley, Hwang also held a series of meetings with global startups and Big Tech companies, which specialized in AI sectors such as multi-modal emotional analysis AI solutions and real-time text-to-video, to discover the latest global AI technology trends and seek various business opportunities.

At the annual shareholders’ meeting held last month, the LG Uplus chief stressed that it is a “pivotal moment to see which company will first secure AI application technology and commercialize and innovate it.”

Since then, the company has been focused on securing technological capabilities that can quickly create unprecedented differentiated customer value by using AI with keywords such as applied technology, imagination and speed.