Microsoft said Korea's artificial intelligence adoption rate is among the highest in the world and pledged to strengthen cooperation with Korean companies. The tech giant's strategy centers on boosting corporate productivity through its generative AI assistant Copilot.
Cho Won-woo, CEO of Microsoft Korea, said in a keynote speech at the "MS AI Tour Seoul" event held at COEX in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, on Monday that "Korea's AI market currently stands at approximately $7 billion (about 10.5 trillion won)." He added, "Considering it has been growing steadily at over 30% annually, the market is expected to reach $50 billion (about 75 trillion won) by 2032." The MS AI Tour is a global event that Microsoft holds annually in major cities around the world.
According to Microsoft's "2025 AI Diffusion Report," generative AI usage among Korea's working-age population reached approximately 30% in the second half of last year. The quarter-on-quarter growth rate was the highest among the 30 countries surveyed. This high level of receptivity has led global AI companies to view Korea as an important market. Cho stressed, "AI transformation is no longer a question of whether to adopt it, but rather how to translate it into measurable, tangible business outcomes."
Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of cloud and AI, presented the "Frontier Framework" as a core strategy for AI transformation that fundamentally reshapes how companies operate. The framework consists of four pillars: enhancing employee experience, innovating customer engagement, redesigning business processes, and accelerating innovation — all supported by Microsoft's Copilot. Users can leverage Copilot's various capabilities to design customized AI agents and automate tasks to improve efficiency.
"The frontier transformation will be a key driver that goes beyond early-stage AI adoption to create a new dimension of outcomes and fundamentally redesign how businesses operate," Guthrie said. "We will support Korean companies in growing into trusted frontier enterprises that lead AI innovation through intelligent solutions that reason and create with AI."
The keynote also introduced the latest Copilot updates with enhanced intelligent agent capabilities. Microsoft 365 Wave 3 delivers agent experiences that reflect users' work context within core apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, powered by Work IQ.
Copilot Cowork allows users to set goals, after which it integrates data across M365 apps — including email, calendar, and documents — based on Work IQ, and plans and executes multi-step tasks. This feature is being offered on a priority basis to Frontier Program users.
Starting May 1, a new unified enterprise plan — Microsoft 365 E7 (Frontier Suite) — will enable companies to deploy intelligent agents in a more secure environment. The plan combines the existing E5 plan with Copilot and Agents 365. Agents 365 allows users to audit the security performance of agents built with Copilot, enabling safer use of AI technology.
