Did you know R&D Management’s very first article on AI dates back to 1985? Written by Dr. Thomas Bernold, it sat almost forgotten for forty years – just four citations – warning that without real applications and industrial investment, AI would stay stuck in the lab. Read today, it feels remarkably current.

I brought it back into the light in Seoul, at the opening workshop for our new special issue on AI, organized by Joonmo Ahn and colleagues at Korea University with whom we’ve just signed a faculty exchange agreement – and the energy in the room was hard to ignore, with a Vice Minister and LG’s own Head of AI Research staying for the entire session rather than just the opening remarks.

What I’m bringing home is basically three lessons: AI has to be treated as an organizational capability rather than something you simply buy, its value only really shows up when combined with domain expertise and real data, and, like every industrial revolution before it, this one will take plenty of trial and error to get right.

Photos: R&D Management