AIO2O Signs MOU with Podium & Company to Scale AI Marketing & Negotiation Platforms AI Marketing Debuts with Cosmetic Brand ‘GANGNAM MIIN’ to Accelerate K-Beauty’s Global Expansion

- MOU signed to scale AIO2O’s ‘AI Marketing Automation Platform’ and ‘AI Negotiation Agent’ - AIO2O leads technology development and service operations; Podium & Company drives PoC and business development at home and abroad - AI marketing solution first deployed with cosmetic brand ‘GANGNAM MIIN’, leveraging Podium & Company’s overseas distribution network [L: Lee Won-jae, CEO of Podium & Company; R: Sungmin Ahn, CEO of AIO2O, at the MOU signing ceremony. Photo courtesy of AIO2O] [Pangyo, May 12, 2026] – Vertical AI solution provider AIO2O (CEO: Sungmin Ahn) and global business-development firm Podium & Company (CEO: Lee Won-jae) announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed on May 7 to jointly scale AIO2O’s ‘AI Marketing Automation Platform’ and ‘AI Negotiation Agent Platform’ across domestic and overseas markets.   At the heart of the partnership is the pairing of a ‘proven AI solution stack’ with ‘global business channels’ under one team. AIO2O will own the technical advancement and product strategy of its ‘AI Marketing Automation Platform’ and ‘AI Negotiation Agent’ to sharpen product competitiveness, while Podium & Company will tap its domestic and overseas business networks to drive everything from PoC sourcing to commercialization and scale-up. The result is a ‘dual-track acceleration’ model in which solution development and market entry run in parallel — an execution-driven partnership designed to turn the agreement into revenue from day one.   As the partnership’s first deliverable, the AI marketing automation solution will be deployed first with GANGNAM MIIN, a cosmetic brand for which Podium & Company holds overseas distribution rights. Built on the slogan ‘Embodying the Korean Woman’s Aspirations’, GANGNAM MIIN is a skin-boosting skincare brand targeting ambitious women in their 20s and 30s, and is now accelerating its global rollout through Podium & Company’s overseas distribution network.   K-beauty exports are hitting record highs, with indie brands taking an ever-larger share of overseas revenue. Yet for small and mid-sized brands, the talent to simultaneously manage multi-channel content, localize marketing to each market’s language and culture, and analyze performance has remained a persistent bottleneck. AIO2O’s marketing automation platform tackles that gap: with only a business URL as input, its AI agents autonomously run the full loop — from research and multilingual content creation to distribution, performance analytics, and campaign optimization — and are expected to dissolve the global marketing bottleneck facing indie K-beauty brands like GANGNAM MIIN.   Sungmin Ahn, CEO of AIO2O, said, “When Podium & Company’s global business-development capabilities meet AIO2O’s vertical AI automation, we can usher in an era where indie K-beauty brands run global campaigns without needing a dedicated marketing team.” He added, “Starting with the GANGNAM MIIN PoC, we plan to rapidly expand AI marketing platform adoption across the cosmetics and lifestyle sectors.”   Lee Won-jae, CEO of Podium & Company, emphasized, “K-beauty’s potential in overseas markets is undeniable, but for smaller brands, marketing operations remain the single biggest constraint on scaling.” He continued, “We will first deploy AIO2O’s proven AI marketing platform with GANGNAM MIIN, and then roll it out to more brands through Podium’s domestic and overseas business networks.”   About the Companies O2O Inc. is a vertical AI solution company solving real-world industry problems. Through domain-specialized services — including end-to-end marketing automation agents for small businesses, a strategic marketing automation platform for premium medical clinics, and AI-powered negotiation and transaction solutions — the company is accelerating the digital transformation of small businesses and enterprises. AIO2O’s technology has been recognized at home and abroad, with honors including the ITU ‘AI for Good – Innovate for Impact Awards 2025’, the inaugural ‘Republic of Korea AI Innovation Grand Prize’, and designation as a ‘High-Growth Company in Future New Industries’ by Daegu Metropolitan City. Podium & Company Inc. is a business-development specialist with strong expertise in global business development and the operation of brand distribution networks. Supporting K-beauty and lifestyle brands as they expand abroad, the firm accelerates the global growth of leading Korean brands through its overseas distribution network and PoC operating capabilities.

2026-05-12

AI O2O Partners with KT to Launch Hyper-local Marketing Automation Platform for Small Businesses

AI O2O (CEO Ahn Sung-min), a vertical AI specialist that proved its global technological prowess with an ITU award, announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with KT to target the hyper-local marketing automation platform market for small business owners. Bridging the Market Gap with Strategic Collaboration This agreement is a strategic alliance designed to resolve the practical vacuum in the domestic and international marketing automation markets. While various marketing automation solutions exist globally, their accessibility for small business owners and SMEs is significantly low due to complex configurations and steep learning curves. Expert Insight: Vertical AI experts point out that existing solutions are designed for large corporate marketing organizations, making them virtually "impossible tools" for small businesses without dedicated marketing staff. Rising Demand: The demand for marketing automation is expanding beyond small businesses to all sectors, including hospitality, food service, B2B/B2C manufacturing, and franchise management. Cost Efficiency: In a 20-trillion-won domestic digital advertising market, AI marketing automation has emerged as a key solution to simultaneously reduce production costs and improve targeting accuracy. Introducing 'ADO2': The One-Click AI Solution AI O2O and KT are jointly developing 'ADO2' (Ad-O-Two), a platform designed to eliminate market barriers through one-click usability. Automated Content Creation: By simply entering a business URL, the AI automatically collects and analyzes store information to generate multimodal content—including lyrics, images, songs, and videos—tailored to specific industries. Speed and Quality: Users can launch high-quality marketing campaigns in under 5 minutes without complex settings or prior training. Enhanced Visibility: The platform automatically inserts SEO/AEO optimization tags, improving search exposure by over 25%. Integrated Distribution: Content can be simultaneously distributed across YouTube, Instagram, Naver Clip, in-store Digital Information Displays (DID), and the "Genie TV Our Neighborhood" service. Industry Leadership and Market Outlook Park Byeong-jun, Team Leader of KT's Advertising Convergence Team, emphasized: "While existing solutions were tools for marketers, ADO2 is a tool for non-professionals". He added that it is rare to find a solution in the global market that provides such intuitive usability while supporting multimodal content generation and integrated online/offline distribution. KT plans to use its nationwide sales network to provide services starting with small business owners and moving to customers of various sizes across all industries. The market outlook is highly promising. It is estimated that less than 5% of Korea's 7 million small business owners have currently adopted digital marketing automation. Considering the 2-trillion-won small business marketing market and the broader SME market, the potential for growth is substantial.

2025-12-31

AI O2O Named Outstanding Performance Company in NIPA’s 2025 AI Voucher Project for Small Business Support

AI O2O (CEO Ahn Sung-min), a vertical AI specialist that has proven its global technological prowess through an ITU global award and the Korea AI Innovation Grand Prize, announced on the 18th that it has been selected as an "Outstanding Performance Company" in the ‘2025 AI Voucher Support Project (Small Business Sector).’ The project is a national initiative organized by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA). It supports demand-side companies (SMEs, ventures, mid-sized firms, and medical institutions) in adopting optimal AI solutions within a short period, while providing supply-side companies with opportunities to create new markets. Through this project, AI O2O developed an AI marketing automation solution focused on small business owners and local service-based companies, and is currently pushing forward with technological advancement and full-scale platform commercialization. Following this selection, AI O2O presented its success story at the ‘AI Voucher Performance Briefing & 2026 Direction Session’ held on December 17th at the COEX Grand Ballroom in Seoul. The presentation covered the current status of copyrights and intellectual property for its ‘AI Multimodal Marketing Automation Solution,’ as well as future business plans including domestic and international MOUs. Core Technology and Impact AI O2O’s AI marketing automation solution enables small business owners and SMEs to easily create and distribute high-quality marketing content without the need for specialized personnel or high costs. Key features include: Automatic Data Collection: Automatically collects and analyzes store information simply by entering a URL. Multimodal Generation: Automatically generates customized images, text, music, and videos tailored to specific industries. SEO/AEO Optimization: Dramatically improves search visibility through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). While the digital transformation rate for small businesses in Korea currently stands at only 15.4%, AI O2O’s solution is evaluated as significantly lowering the entry barrier to digital marketing. Small business owners who adopted the solution experienced: 90% reduction in marketing content production time. 70% reduction in costs. 25% average increase in sales. Market Outlook and Future Roadmap Vertical AI industry experts noted that demand for AI-based automation is surging in the 2 trillion won marketing market targeting Korea's 7 million small business owners. They anticipate that trust in government-verified AI solutions will grow, especially as economic conditions toughen and instances of marketing fraud increase. Ahn Sung-min, CEO of AI O2O, stated, “Through the AI Voucher project, we identified the practical needs of small businesses and local service providers and successfully delivered solutions reflecting those needs. We plan to rapidly expand these solutions to local businesses and provide optimized services for industry-specific content strategies and hyper-local marketing.” Building on the success of this project, AI O2O plans to: H1 2026: Formally launch services for the domestic lodging industry. H2 2026: Expand the market to target high-unit non-benefit hospitals, private academies (hagwons), and local governments.

2025-12-19

AI O2O Targets APAC Media Market, Participates in '2025 APAC TV Summit' with Multimodal AI Content Solution

AI O2O (CEO Ahn Sung-min), a specialist in vertical AI solutions, announced on the 20th that it is officially entering the Asia-Pacific media market by participating in the '2025 APAC TV Summit,' held at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center in Bangkok, Thailand, from November 18th to 20th. The APAC TV Summit, hosted by Google, is the largest TV and streaming media summit in the Asia-Pacific region, attended by senior executives from broadcasters, OTT platforms, content producers, and media tech companies from over 30 Asian countries. At this summit, AI O2O achieved success in finding partners to accelerate the global expansion of its 'Multimodal AI Content Automatic Generation and Distribution Platform.' The company is currently preparing joint proposals for solutions to InnoPia Tech, Deutsche Telekom, and Orange S.A. (a French broadcasting operator). Furthermore, the solution will be introduced to business representatives from Humax Networks' clients, including Charter Communications, Direct TV, and AT&T in the US. Through Marusys and Marusys Vina, AI O2O plans to officially launch sales of the solution in Vietnam, starting with Viettel, next year. The core features of this solution include: automatic generation of customized promotional content for target viewers, integrated production of multimodal content such as lyrics, songs, music, images, and videos, simultaneous distribution across multiple channels (IPTV, OTT, social media), real-time viewer response analysis and content optimization, and maximizing marketing ROI through A/B test automation. AI O2O's confidence in differentiating itself within the media market stems from its robust intellectual property portfolio. It holds over 50 intellectual properties, a significant portion of which are core technologies directly applicable to the media and content industry. Notable patents include: 'System and Method for Extracting Movie Metadata,' 'Customized Movie Recommendation System based on Metadata of Movie Complex Data,' 'System and Method for Constructing Movie Scene Metadata,' and 'AI-based Card News Content Quality Assurance Processing System.' These patents cover key areas of IPTV/OTT platform operation, such as automated analysis of media content, metadata extraction, personalized recommendations, and quality control. The Asia-Pacific media market is experiencing rapid changes in content consumption patterns with the explosive growth of IPTV and OTT platforms. Broadcasters and OTT platforms are actively considering adopting AI-based automation solutions to cope with the surge in content demand. Especially, APAC media companies operating in multi-country and multi-language environments face challenges such as customizing content localization for viewers in each country, managing content creation burdens due to simultaneous multi-channel operations, and optimizing content based on real-time viewer data. AI O2O CEO Ahn Sung-min emphasized, "In the age of IPTV and OTT, the ability to produce large quantities of personalized content in real-time and distribute it optimized for multi-channels is key to competitiveness. AI O2O's content automation solution helps broadcasters and OTT platforms maximize viewer experience while simultaneously reducing operating costs." Since its establishment in 2017, AI O2O has commercialized numerous AI voice and metadata-based services, verifying the effectiveness of its vertical AI solutions in diverse industries including distribution, finance, and healthcare. This participation in the APAC TV Summit is a strategic move to expand its domestically proven vertical AI capabilities into the media and broadcasting industry and officially enter the high-growth Asia-Pacific market. In particular, the media industry is seeing an explosive increase in demand for AI automation across the entire process of content production, distribution, and marketing, indicating that AI O2O's vertical AI approach perfectly aligns with market needs. This year, AI O2O has consecutively received recognition for its technology both domestically and internationally, including winning the ITU 'AI for Good-Innovate for Impact Awards 2025,' the '1st Korea AI Innovation Grand Prize,' being designated a 'High-Growth Company in Future New Industries' by Daegu Metropolitan City, and winning the Big Data/AI sector at the 'National Quality Innovation Competition.' CEO Ahn Sung-min stressed, "The media AI market is an area that requires complex domain knowledge that cannot be solved by general-purpose generative AI alone," and highlighted, "AI O2O's core media industry technologies—such as multimedia streaming, metadata analysis, and content quality assurance—are protected by patents, allowing us to provide both technological reliability and legal stability to global media companies." AI media industry experts anticipate that AI O2O will successfully enter the Asia-Pacific media market using this APAC TV Summit as a stepping stone, growing into a global enterprise that leads the South Korean vertical AI and AI media ecosystem.

2025-11-21

AI O2O Debuts AI Negotiation and Marketing Automation Solutions at Microsoft Ignite 2025, Receives High Praise from Global VCs

AI O2O (CEO Ahn Sung-min), a specialist in vertical AI solutions, announced that it received positive evaluations from global Venture Capitalists (VCs) after showcasing its 'AI Marketing Automation Platform' and 'AI Negotiation Agent' solutions at 'Microsoft Ignite 2025,' held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from November 18th to 21st. Microsoft Ignite is Microsoft's premier global conference, bringing together IT professionals, businesses, and investors from around the world. This year, the event particularly focused on 'Agentic AI' and enterprise AI innovation. AI O2O demonstrated the tangible results of its vertical AI solutions, which automate real business tasks, drawing attention from global enterprises and specialized vertical AI investors. The two core solutions AI O2O presented at the event were the 'AI Marketing Automation Platform' and the 'AI Negotiation Agent.' The 'AI Marketing Automation Platform' is a solution that uses AI to automate the entire lifecycle of content marketing for businesses and small merchants. It supports the integrated creation of multimodal content—such as customized lyrics and songs, images, and videos—based on promotional keywords, and includes integrated support for A/B testing and performance analysis. The 'AI Negotiation Agent' is a solution that automatically performs repetitive price negotiations, term adjustments, and supplier management that occur in Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions. It analyzes past transaction data, current market conditions, and real-time lowest prices to suggest optimal negotiation strategies. It provides a real-time conversational negotiation service and can conduct simultaneous negotiations with multiple suppliers. The negotiation results are accumulated in the negotiation strategy data, feeding back into Reinforcement Learning. Based on the clear differentiation that its strategies become more sophisticated as usage accumulates, the solution contributes to a substantive increase in corporate profits. During the event, AI O2O received positive feedback from global vertical AI investors. In particular, the company was praised for its differentiation through a "vertical AI approach that automates actual tasks in specific industries, rather than a general-purpose AI." Furthermore, its proven track record of actual performance through collaboration with large enterprises "instills confidence." A representative from a global vertical AI investment firm commented, "AI O2O possesses a business model verified in Korea and has a clear strategy for expansion into the global AI SaaS market," adding, "Marketing automation and negotiation automation are universal corporate needs, regardless of industry or region, giving the company excellent global scalability." Through its participation in MS Ignite 2025, AI O2O held meetings with potential customers and partners from various regions, including North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, to prepare for global market entry. The company plans to follow up with discussions on pilot projects and strategic alliances. AI O2O CEO Ahn Sung-min emphasized, "MS Ignite 2025 was a meaningful occasion that confirmed AI O2O's competitiveness beyond the domestic market and on the global stage," and stressed, "Vertical AI solutions solve universal corporate needs regardless of industry or geography, giving them huge potential for global expansion." He concluded, "Based on the references and technological prowess built up in Korea, we will formally enter the global enterprise market and grow into a leading specialist in customized AI solutions representing Korea." The AI investment industry anticipates that AI O2O will use this global stage debut as a springboard to prove the global competitiveness of Korean B2B AI solutions and grow into a global leader in the vertical AI sector.

2025-11-21

AI O2O, Specialist in Vertical AI Solutions, Wins 'Korea AI Innovation Grand Prize'

AI O2O (CEO Ahn Sung-min), a company specializing in vertical AI solutions, announced on the 10th that it has won the '1st Korea AI Innovation Grand Prize.' The award recognizes the technological innovation and practicality demonstrated by AI O2O in the fields of AI-based negotiation automation and marketing automation. The awards ceremony was held on November 10th at the National Assembly Experience Hall in Yeouido, co-hosted by the Korea AI Innovation Grand Prize Committee, the International Futures Forum, and the Electronic Times under the theme, "Implementing the K-Initiative through K-AI Humanism and Innovation." AI O2O is leading the vertical AI market with its 'AI Negotiation Agent,' which automates repetitive and inefficient negotiation processes in B2B transactions, and its 'AI Marketing Automation Platform,' which automatically generates, distributes, and manages multimodal content using AI. The judging panel stated, "AI O2O is differentiated by its vertical AI approach, which automates real-world tasks in specific industries rather than being a general-purpose AI. Its effectiveness has been validated through collaboration with large enterprises," and concluded, "Its application of AI to core business areas—negotiation and marketing—and its creation of tangible results were highly evaluated." AI O2O has consecutively received international and domestic recognition for its technology, including winning the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) 'AI for Good-Innovate for Impact Awards 2025,' being designated a 'High-Growth Company in Future New Industries' by Daegu Metropolitan City, and winning the Big Data/AI sector at the 'National Quality Innovation Competition.' This latest 'Korea AI Innovation Grand Prize' is significant as it solidifies the company's position as an innovative enterprise within the domestic AI ecosystem, following its international acclaim. AI O2O CEO Ahn Sung-min stated, "This award is a recognition of the value of 'Practical Vertical AI' that AI O2O has pursued," and shared the business vision: "We are growing into a company that creates value by driving innovation in corporate environments and daily life, by providing AI solutions specialized for specific industries and tasks, tailored to the needs of large, mid-sized companies, and small business owners." With the public recognition of its technology and market competitiveness through this award, investor interest is expected to increase further. AI investment experts anticipate that AI O2O will lead the Korean vertical AI ecosystem and continue to grow into a company recognized for its competitiveness in the global AI SaaS market.

2025-11-21