Small steps, big gains
The three-year project started small and gradually scaled up. In practice, this meant building a minimum viable product first, using incremental wins to build confidence. Korean Air’s first step was a staff meal management app. By digitizing what had been a paper voucher system and rolling it out to more than 20,000 employees, the airline gained real-world experience in operating cloud systems, while simultaneously developing skills in SaaS and cloud technologies.
Korean Air has now gone beyond cloud adoption to pursue application modernization, customer data integration, AI projects, and predictive platform development. And this year, it launched technologies such as an AI Contact Center and a passenger data analytics platform. “At the start, we weren’t directly preparing for the AI era,” Choi says. “But because we already built a solid cloud foundation, we were able to continuously expand into a variety of technology projects afterward. For Korean Air, the cloud migration wasn’t just an infrastructure replacement, it became a critical inflection point that created new growth drivers, and even reshaped our organizational culture.”
From relying on to growing through outsourcing
Today under Choi, Korean Air’s IT strategy departmentoversees the airline’s entire digital transformation, covering infrastructure technologies such as cloud, networks, and devices, as well as applications, data, AI, and ML. Around 150 employees are organized into nine teams, executing dozens of projects of varying scale each year. Over time, both the size and goals of this organization have evolved.
