SK Telecom CEO谈AI时代招聘与“人才债”，短线缺乏可交易增量

SK Telecom (017670) Chief Executive Jung Jae-hun warned companies scaling back entry-level hiring that they will "face a talent debt with neither juniors nor seniors five to 10 years from now." Cutting new hires on the assumption that artificial intelligence will make up the productivity gap, he said, will leave companies without a competitive edge in the future. The CEO also outlined plans to gradually increase the number of new recruits at SK Telecom.
Speaking at a special lecture at Seoul National University on the 1st under the theme "Choices and Opportunities in the AI Era," Jung said, "As AI takes over the work that new hires used to do, such as organizing materials and drafting documents, companies now need seniors with long experience and networks more than juniors." He added, "But if they stop hiring juniors for that reason, five to 10 years from now the seniors will have retired and there will be no juniors — that is the talent debt phenomenon."
The remarks were read as a warning that companies cutting new hires in reliance on AI may face long-term staffing gaps and far higher costs to secure talent later, much as running up credit card spending on the strength of present comfort can swell debt beyond what one can handle. "SK Telecom, which used to hire several hundred people at a time, has taken on only a dozen or so in recent years," Jung said. "We see that as the wrong strategy, and we are now widening the range."
Jung also introduced the concept of a "J curve of AI transformation," which he said he developed himself. The J curve is an economics theory describing the relationship between exchange rates and the trade balance: a weaker currency might appear to improve the trade balance immediately, but because it takes time for import and export volumes to adjust, the balance initially worsens instead.
Jung, who has led SK Telecom's AI transformation over the past year and applied the theory to AI, said, "When you first tell employees to use AI, they say AI is more inconvenient." He stressed, "But an organization that turns back at this valley of inconvenience stays on the left side of the curve forever, while one that endures it will at some point bend upward into a J." At SK Telecom, one system modification task that developers had handled in 50 hours took more than 500 hours in the early stage of AI adoption, but the time required later fell to one hour.
The lecture was the first class in a joint AI program that SK Telecom and Seoul National University have run for 10 years. Jung, who entered the university's law school in 1987, returned to the podium at his alma mater after about 40 years.