South Korea's artificial intelligence (AI) market is attracting attention from various countries, including France and Canada, as companies look to expand beyond the U.S. and China. Following Canadian AI firm Cohere, French AI company Mistral is also establishing a local presence and increasing its hiring efforts.
According to industry sources, Mistral is actively pursuing entry into the South Korean market. In June, the company posted a job listing for a 'Senior AI Business Strategist' to work in Seoul and is currently hiring developers, including application scientists and machine learning full-stack engineers.
Mistral, founded in 2023 by former employees of Google DeepMind and Meta, has been recognized as Europe's equivalent of OpenAI and is at the forefront of France's 'sovereign AI' movement.
On September 8, Mistral announced it raised €3 billion (approximately 4.68 trillion won) in a Series D funding round that included participation from Samsung Electronics. This funding round has valued the company at over €21 billion (about 32.8 trillion won).
Not to be outdone, Canadian firm Cohere announced last month that it has established a subsidiary in South Korea, aiming to use it as a foothold for the Asia-Pacific market. At that time, the company outlined plans to collaborate with local model developers and system integrators, currently partnering with LG CNS.
Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, a co-author of the influential 'Transformer' paper on generative AI technology. The company is focusing its business expansion on the enterprise AI market rather than consumer AI.
The growing interest from global AI companies like Mistral and Cohere in the South Korean market is attributed to the country's high AI usage rates and rapidly increasing demand for enterprise AI solutions. According to a report from Microsoft's AI Economy Institute, the usage rate of generative AI in South Korea rose to 30.7% in the second half of last year, an increase of 4.8 percentage points from the first half, marking the largest rise among major countries.
The Bank of Korea noted that the speed of AI adoption in the country is unusually rapid compared to previous digital technologies. Seo Do-hyung, a researcher at the Bank of Korea's Employment Research Team, stated, "The utilization rate of generative AI for work purposes among South Korean workers is 51.8%, which is more than double the 26.5% rate in the United States."
Demand for enterprise AI is also on the rise. An analysis by the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI) of 38,522 domestic business reports found that 53.7% of companies included AI-related content in their reports in 2024, surpassing non-AI firms.
Seo Young-sun, a KISDI research fellow, commented, "The application of AI in domestic companies is rapidly shifting from technology development to practical business applications. Recently, the use of generative AI and AI hardware has increased, leading to more practical and efficient implementations of AI in businesses."
Internationally, South Korea is viewed as a significant market for global AI companies. The U.S. Department of Commerce's International Trade Administration (ITA) noted in a digital economy analysis report published in June that South Korean large corporations' investments in AI are moving beyond initial experiments to ecosystem development. The expansion of AI adoption across various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, and finance, is creating new business opportunities for foreign technology firms.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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