[AI Brief] Xenon Posts KRW 11.76 Billion in First-Half Sales, Up 331% Year Over Year

IT Daily operates “AI Brief,” a daily media column that curates and delivers key AI news from Korea and abroad.

Includes a photo of Xenon. Xenon on the 3rd disclosed its first-half standalone sales and operating profit for this year.

Xenon’s first-half standalone sales for this year came to KRW 11.76 billion. That marks a 331% increase from the same period last year.

First-half operating profit was KRW 2.2 billion. The first-half operating profit was 3.1 times last year’s full-year operating profit of KRW 700 million, and the first-half operating margin was 18.7%.

The first-half operating margin was 12.7 percentage points higher than last year’s full-year operating margin of 6%. According to the company, Xenon will maintain a profitable streak for 3 consecutive years starting in 2024.

Xenon said the results reflect the expansion of the AX market as well as the company’s technology and commercialization experience. It added that market demand centered on its AX platform, “Xenos,” led to successful orders, which in turn expanded its business scope.

Xenon is supporting the entire process of AI strategy development, development, adoption, and operation centered on “Xenos.” Its core business area had been projects in the financial sector, and alongside the expansion of those projects, it is recently pursuing a broader customer base and application scope across industries such as pharmaceuticals.

Xenon is also exploring new business areas. In physical AI, after opening a dedicated lab in March this year, it is conducting R&D on “Genpi” with the goal of commercializing the physical AI solution for senior care in cooperation with KB Financial Group. In the B2C area, it unveiled “Zena,” an integrated portal for AI agents.

Xenon is also strengthening management expertise in line with its business expansion. Through an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders in June, it completed the appointment of Choi Jaekwon, a professor at the KAIST AI Graduate School, as an outside director, and said Professor Choi, who has research and expertise in AI, is expected to support Xenon’s mid- to long-term technology and business strategy.

NDS said it has been recognized by AWS for its generative AI and agentic AI consulting capabilities. On the 3rd, NDS said it had obtained the “Generative AI Consulting Services” and “Agentic AI Consulting Services” categories under AWS AI Competency, one of AWS’s specialized certification programs based on the use of AWS technology.

AWS Competency is a specialized certification program based on the use of AWS technology. It assesses a company’s ability to solve customers’ complex challenges by industry and use case.

The evaluation criteria include customer success experience, specialized personnel, and service delivery systems. AWS assesses each company’s capabilities based on these criteria.

The “Generative AI Consulting Services” category covers corporate generative AI adoption strategy development, foundation model selection, RAG-based service development, testing, and operations. Its certification feature is consulting capability across the entire generative AI lifecycle.

The “Agentic AI Consulting Services” category evaluates capabilities such as understanding user goals, designing AI agents that make autonomous decisions and take action, implementing AI agents, integrating enterprise data, connecting work tools, governance, and support for stable operations.

NDS said it plans to provide integrated support across the entire AI transformation process based on the two certifications. The scope of support includes AI adoption consulting, data integration, service design, development, operations, and enhancement.

NDS plans to expand the use of AI in general business tasks such as internal corporate knowledge search, data analysis, and work automation. It also plans to expand AI use in manufacturing and logistics for equipment data monitoring and anomaly detection.

In addition, NDS plans to expand the use of AI for secure data analysis in healthcare and research, and to continue broadening AI use cases tailored to industry-specific work environments.

Crowdworks announced on the 3rd that it had won a contract for the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Information Society Agency (NIA)-commissioned project, “Supporting the Establishment of an AI Agent Safety and Reliability Verification Framework.” Crowdworks has begun building a safety and reliability evaluation framework that includes verifying AI agents’ decision-making and execution processes.

In this project, Crowdworks will lead the construction of multi-step reasoning scenarios and Korean-style verification datasets. Based on the data to be built, it will be possible to evaluate not only an AI’s final answer but also the logical validity of the process used to derive that answer.

The plan includes designing multi-step reasoning scenarios by difficulty level, creating tasks solved through sequential and parallel calls to various Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools and external APIs, and building a dataset of more than 7,000 records to evaluate them. The dataset will reflect Korea-specific contexts and include frequently changing dynamic data, and it will be designed to verify an agent’s accuracy in judging variable situations.

A Crowdworks official said the company will build the dataset based on its know-how in high-quality data construction and evaluation capabilities, adding that it aims to contribute to improving the safety and reliability of the domestic AI agent ecosystem. The official also expressed a willingness to help establish Korean-style AI agent verification standards that meet global levels.

Source: IT DAILY · Yang Seung-gap
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241396

References

• https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241396