SEOUL — Samsung Group, South Korea's largest conglomerate, has announced a radical paradigm shift that will fundamentally reconstruct its corporate culture and operational blueprint. Led by Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong, the tech giant is launching a group-wide "AI Transformation (AX)" initiative, mandating that all 400,000 employees across all affiliates integrate generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their daily workflows.

This marks the first time a global mega-conglomerate has attempted a top-down, ubiquitous implementation of external generative AI models across its entire business ecosystem. According to inside sources, Samsung plans to officially deploy leading global AI architectures—including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude—by the end of this month.

A New Era of Innovation: Echoes of the 1993 Frankfurt Declaration

Industry observers and business analysts are comparing this sweeping directive to the historic 1993 "Frankfurt Declaration" by the late Chairman Lee Kun-hee, who famously urged employees to "change everything except your wife and children" to propel Samsung into a global tech leader. Now, 33 years later, Chairman Lee Jae-yong is steering the ship toward an entirely different frontier: an "AI-Native" future.

In his New Year’s address earlier this year, Chairman Lee laid the groundwork for this cultural shift, stating, "We must completely transform the way we work and overhaul our organizational DNA. AI must be seamlessly injected into every stage of our business value chain, from research and development (R&D) to production, marketing, and corporate support."

The announcement has sent shockwaves through the global business community. Furthermore, this move aligns with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s national agenda, outlined during his first anniversary press conference, which aims to position South Korea as the world's premier nation in integrating AI into both industry and daily life.

The Eight-Core Process Overhaul and Dedicated AI Units

The AX revolution will be spearheaded by a council of approximately 50 CEOs and presidents across Samsung’s various subsidiaries. These top executives will personally oversee the integration of AI capabilities across eight core business sectors:

Research & Development (R&D): Accelerating product design cycles and software compilation.
Procurement: Optimizing global supply chains through predictive analytics.
Manufacturing & Fabrication: Implementing advanced AI models to maximize semiconductor wafer yields and factory automation.
Logistics: Enhancing distribution efficiency and cross-border shipping mechanisms.
Marketing: Designing hyper-personalized consumer outreach campaigns.
Sales: Automating and optimizing global B2B and B2C sales networks.
Customer Service: Elevating technical support through AI-driven diagnostic interfaces.
Management Support: Streamlining human resources, legal analysis, and financial reporting.
To maintain momentum and ensure rigorous oversight, each Samsung affiliate will establish a dedicated, internal AI task force. These specialized units will be tasked with tailoring unique digital strategies appropriate to their respective fields, managing data sovereignty, monitoring model operations, and nurturing internal AI engineering talent.

Re-Educating a Workforce of 400,000

The logistical scale of Samsung’s educational initiative is unprecedented. To kick off the campaign, Samsung will host an exclusive, two-day "AX Boot Camp" for its highest-level executive suite at the Samsung Human Resources Development Center (Hoam Hall) this month. Built on the corporate philosophy that "a CEO's AI literacy dictates the success of AX," the program will forgo theoretical lectures in favor of intensive, hands-on coding and prompt-engineering seminars led by global tech experts. At the conclusion of this camp, the leadership group is scheduled to declare a joint "AX Vision," signifying a unified commitment to survival in the volatile intelligence age.

Following the CEO boot camp, a comprehensive training pipeline will target the remaining corporate ladder. Roughly 2,300 executive-level managers will undergo mandatory, three-day, two-night immersive training sessions at Samsung’s primary training facilities through August 12, 2026.

Simultaneously, custom curriculum programs will roll out to the broader workforce, aiming for 100% completion by the end of the year. The scale of the deployment spans across Samsung’s massive domestic workforce:

Samsung Electronics: 129,000 employees
Samsung Display: 21,000 employees
Samsung SDI: 13,000 employees
Samsung Electro-Mechanics: 12,000 employees
Samsung SDS: 11,000 employees
Samsung C&T: 9,300 employees
Samsung Biologics: 5,500 employees
Samsung Life Insurance: 5,100 employees
Securing the Future as an 'AI-Native' Entity

The aggressive timeline reflects an acute awareness within Samsung's leadership that late adoption in the AI landscape poses an existential threat. As competitors rush to implement standalone applications, Samsung’s holistic approach aims to establish deep structural advantages that are difficult to replicate.

"In past decades, Samsung successfully navigated the digital revolution and the smartphone transition through bold challenges and constant reinvention, cementing our place as an ultra-first-class global enterprise," a senior Samsung official commented on the condition of anonymity. "The AX initiative is not merely an operational upgrade; it is the official launchpad to becoming an inherently 'AI-Native' corporation. By embedding these cognitive systems into our core architecture, we intend to proactively seize and dominate the opportunities of the AI era."

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