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Startups' artificial intelligence (AI) transformation is shifting from "how to use AI well" to "how to make money with AI." The dedicated AI teams once created to train employees have completed their mission, and AI is moving toward services that solve customer problems on the sales front lines. Startups that have rapidly experimented with company-wide AI adoption are now elevating AX beyond a transformation of organizational culture to a stage of discovering new revenue models.
According to the industry on the 17th, travel startup MyRealTrip decided last month to halt the operation of its AI Lab. The AI Lab was an organization launched in 2024 to help employees understand AI and effectively apply it to their work. Recently, however, MyRealTrip judged that its employees' AI literacy had reached a certain level and decided to wind down the organization after about two years.
Instead, now that all employees can use AI, MyRealTrip is moving in earnest to transform existing job roles. A representative example is an employee who had handled backend development taking on sales and marketing roles. In the first-half performance reviews, the company also created an "AI Nativeness" category. The goal is to evaluate not simply how often someone uses AI, but the outputs created with AI and the real changes brought to the organization.
As it focuses on commercializing AI, the company has also newly introduced and is operating a "Sales Lab." The Sales Lab is a program in which product engineers work on the sales front lines for three weeks to identify customer and organizational problems and build services that solve them with AI. MyRealTrip said, "If our goal until now had been to raise the AI literacy of all members, this year it is to create actual business results with AI," adding, "We are looking for an answer to how to reinvest the cost and time saved by AI into understanding customers more deeply."
Channel Corporation, which operates the business messenger "Channel Talk," recently changed the title of its Chief AI Officer (CAIO) to Chief Strategy Officer (CSO). Channel Corporation undertook this reorganization because it judged that the company's challenges had changed as most employees became able to use AI. Whereas just a year ago adopting AX within the organization was the main task, now generating actual business results based on AI has become the core goal.
The company is also actively recruiting talent equipped with commercialization capabilities. This is because it believes that for newly launched AI products to take hold in the market, the ability to read customer demand and spread the product is important, not just technology development. Lee Kyung-hoon, CSO of Channel Corporation, said, "In the early days, AI was used to do faster what each person was already doing—writing documents, research, writing code, summarizing," adding, "Now we are moving to a more organized stage, redesigning the work process itself on the premise of AI rather than simply 'having tried AI.'"
The industry views smaller startups as transforming through AX faster. This is because they are expanding company-wide experiments to ensure AI use leads to actual revenue by weighing productivity and profitability, going beyond adopting external generative AI models and encouraging employees to develop AI agents. This contrasts with the many companies that agree on the necessity of AX yet still depend on individual employees' AI capabilities. According to a recent survey by Wanted Lab of human resources (HR) professionals, only 19.5% of companies actively operate company-wide AI training programs. As many as 78.1% responded that they had no AI usage guidelines or policies.
One industry official said, "Many companies think AX is essential, but in many cases they fail to reach the stage of producing actual results," adding, "To move from a company that uses AI to a company that works with AI, what matters is how naturally AI can be woven into work overall."
