SK Holdings C&C, the information technology services unit of SK Group, said Monday it has teamed up with IBM to launch the Korean version of the U.S. tech giant’s artificial intelligence system Watson early next year.

The two companies plan to develop a set of new application programming interfaces within the year that will allow Watson to understand Korean and communicate in Korean. 

Even after the service launch planned next year, the system will continue to learn Korean upon almost five years of research and development led by IBM’s leading scientists.

Then, the system’s conversational languages will increase to eight, including English, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Arabic.

Under the strategic alliance, SK C&C will run the Watson system in Korea and offer related cognitive computing services such as banking, telecommunications and health care.

The two companies also agreed to support developers and start-ups here for the wider adoption of AI technologies across industries, setting up a new fund to create the ecosystem.

The Watson Cloud Platform will be created at SK C&C’s cloud center in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province, so that developers and start-ups can use its application programming interfaces to develop their own applications for diverse mobile devices and robots.

“Watson remains at the forefront of cognitive computing: advanced systems that learn at scale, understand with meaning, reason with purpose and interact with humans in natural ways,” said David Kenny, general manager of IBM Watson.

“The South Korean marketplace is moving quickly to embrace the disruptive opportunities from next generation technology. Our strategic alliance with SK Holdings C&C will put cognitive services in the hands of more businesses and developers, allowing them to apply Watson within their organizations to help transform entire industries and professions.”

SK C&C is also pinning high hopes on the alliance for it to transform into an AI-based data service company.

“This alliance highlights SK’s dedication to growing our AI-based data services business, strengthening our AI leadership position, as well as spurring innovation and AI adoption across Korea,” said SK Holdings C&C CEO Park Jung-ho.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)