AI Adoption Gap Widens as Companies Fail to Connect AI Models

OpenAI Korea's country lead, Kim Kyung-hoon, recently highlighted the importance of connecting AI models to data and work systems for enterprise adoption. He compared the current AI adoption wave to the introduction of electricity in factories a century ago, where early factories swapped steam engines for electric power but kept machine layouts and work sequences unchanged.

According to Kim, providing AI models to employees is not enough, companies must help AI understand their business context and assign real work before results can materialize. He stressed that companies need to pick their most important work and redesign it from scratch with AI.

A recent analysis by OpenAI found a significant gap between companies that use AI proficiently and those that don't. The top 10% of companies generated 8.3 times more output tokens per active user than median companies, with the gap widening from 2.6x in January to more than triple in just five months.

Kim emphasized the importance of connecting records within an organization so AI can do more work inside the company. He highlighted Cisco as a real-world example, where Codex usage raised defect-fix throughput by 10-15x and cut build times by about 20%.