SK Telecom

Interview with Keunkyo Kim, Head of Global Business at NC AI

NC AI, the AI-focused subsidiary of NCSoft, is positioning itself as a bridge between game-derived AI and industrial AI, according to Keunkyo Kim, its Head of Global Business since 2025 and a veteran of SK Telecom, Apple, and Upstage.

• NC AI is leveraging 14 years of MMORPG-based reinforcement learning and real-time processing expertise to expand from gaming into industrial sectors, including manufacturing, robotics, smart cities, and defense.
• The company is developing a dual-track AI strategy that balances a 200-billion-parameter large language model with lightweight, edge-optimized multimodal diffusion models for field efficiency.
• NC AI’s proprietary VARCO 3D engine enables the generation of physics-based 3D environments from text or images, while the open-source VARCO Vision 2.0 achieved over 10,000 downloads within ten days of release.