<Interview with Yongkoo Ji, Head of Growth Strategy at The Zone Bizon>
“In the age of AI transformation, executives need to make high-level decisions.”
Yong-Koo Ji, 55, head of growth strategy at The Zone Bizon, takes the podium two to three times a week. As the tidal wave of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to sweep across industries, CEOs have been asking for his insights. He is the man who has set the course for The Zone Bizon by keeping his finger on the pulse of the mega-trends leading to the internet, mobile, cloud, and AI.
The Zone Bizon is a total solution provider of ERP and groupware for SMEs with a market share of over 80%. It started as an accounting and tax management software provider and has expanded its business to include cloud services, AI solutions, healthcare, and financial IT. As of December 2024, its market capitalization is close to 2 trillion won.
In addition to his work on corporate survival strategies, Mr. Ji also writes a series of “Yonggu Thoughts” on Facebook, in which he offers his thoughts on individuals, organizations, and society in the age of AI. We caught up with Mr. Ji at The Zone Eulji Tower in Jung-gu, Seoul.
-What inspired you to start writing Yonggu Thoughts?
“I’ve been writing on Facebook for about 11 years. At first, I was following the trend, but the algorithm made me look back at what I had written in the past. It’s interesting to see things that are ‘right then and wrong now.’ Writing makes me self-reflective, and I also realize that what I write might inspire someone. Now, I compile my accumulated thoughts into a yearly book.”
-What‘s in the book?
“I made a mentoring book with a selection of articles on career, management, and leadership. My company is running TIPS, which incubates promising companies since 2019, and I share it with CEOs and employees when I do management consulting and mentoring during the startup incubation process. The Mentoring Book has made Facebook more fun for me. I also recently started a LinkedIn presence (haha).”
-If you’re talking about your most-liked post, it’s
“One that sticks out in recent memory is the one about ‘working people’. If someone asks you, “What do you do?” and you say, “I’m a marketer at Company A,” most of the time you’ll say your job, your profession. But sometimes you’ll hear someone say their mission, like, “I build bridges for brands to connect with the world.” I call them a ‘careerist.
They don’t confine themselves to the workplace, whether it’s consulting, speaking engagements, or working on new projects in between their day jobs. They’re sharpening their own arsenal and going from worker to professional. When I posted this on Facebook, a lot of people resonated with it.”
-Similar to yourstory.
“Me too. I do the occasional consultancy, speaking engagement, or new project – right now I’m co-authoring a book. It’s not that I’m neglecting my work at the company because I’m doing external work, it’s that I want to give my work more meaning and use it for both self-fulfillment and contribution to the organization and society I’m a part of. It’s hard to force someone to take ownership when they don’t, but it’s up to them to have a sense of mission and purpose.”
What is your mission?
“My mission is to create tools that help organizations and individuals grow, facilitate communication, and get ideas flowing.”
AI gives Mr. Ji wings to pursue his mission. He uses AI to find out what needs to be done, what’s not going well, and why things are delayed. “If I didn’t use AI, I would have called my staff into a meeting at that time,” he says, “and that’s where the inefficiency comes in because it takes time away from doing other things.” Time management and efficiency have never been better.
-What does a leader or individual need to do to prepare in the age of AI.
“You need to focus on what you’re good at and develop expertise in those areas, and then you need to be able to apply and connect them. For example, there’s no tool more efficient than AI to take an idea from the initial planning stage to implementation. I think it’s important to use AI to define or plan a concept and then try to translate that into something tangible.
It’s also about the attitude and effort to use and learn AI yourself, rather than relying on others to do it for you. Before the AI era, you delegated digital tasks to IT professionals, but in the AI era, it’s all about trying to use it yourself.”
-What is AI Transformation (AX)?
“Before AI Transformation (AX), there is Digital Transformation (DX). Digital transformation is the power of identifying and gathering quality data. AI transformation is about making decisions based on data with the help of AI. When you have a genius assistant, a powerful digital assistant, and you bring your own experience and insights to the table, you can make decisions like never before.”
Does digital transformation (DX) need to precede AI transformation (AX)?
“If we structure DX, we can define it as ‘DX=① personal experience+② organizational experience+③ customer experience,’ where the order is very important: ① the digital skills and experiences that individuals acquire, ② the organizational experience, and when they are mature enough, ③ the customer experience.
If a product or service is delivered to a customer without sufficiently completing step 2, the company will not be able to give good feedback because the company will need to utilize the product or service better than the customer and experience its usefulness and convenience to clearly understand and accommodate the customer’s needs.
The success equation for digital transformation is the sum of the individual experience, the organizational experience, and the customer experience, and it’s important to scale in that order.”
-What is the effect of AI?
“AI transformation is the application of AI on top of digital transformation, and the effect is multiplicative. What this means is that you need to experience digital transformation or build a ‘digital transformation solution’ before you introduce AI, so that the effect of AI is much greater.
If you build AI without digital transformation, it may not be as effective as it could be. Clean data delivers meaningful results. Good data is the first step, and AI can have a multiplier effect.
According to Columbia University Professor Emeritus Donald Sexton’s Law of Sales, a company’s value increases proportionally to the square of its revenue when it doubles. The price resistance drops because customers find it useful, so they say, “This is a good thing, I should buy it, even if it’s expensive.” That’s a very high increase in value. I use that to describe the effect of AI in the enterprise, and I think it’s a very realistic description.”
-There’s also the AIbubble theory.
“AI is going through a chasm, not a bubble. A chasm is a difficult valley to cross as you scale from ‘I’m investing in it’ to ‘I have to buy it because it’s useful’. Those who invest first always have a head start.
We recognized last year that AI was going to revolutionize this year. We created a new AI product, rolled it out to all 2200 employees early this year, refined it, and deployed OneAI to the market on June 10. Normally, it takes three to four years to get 1000 customers, but with OneAI, it took four months. I’ve never seen anything this fast. Going forward, we’re looking at two months to get 1000 customers, and then one month. It’s not a bubble.”
-What does it mean to have a shorter time to customer?
“A book I’ve been enjoying lately is Enterprise Architecture Strategy, which is a study of leading organizations. Among the many metrics that evaluate leading companies, one that stood out to me was ‘agility’.
Agility is a metric that measures how quickly a company can ramp up new business or new product sales. For example, if it used to take our company four years to bring a new product to market and get 1000 customers, but now it only takes four months, we can be defined as a ‘highly agile’ company.”
Ina column a couple years ago, you quoted Jeff Bezos saying, “A slow decision is more dangerous than a wrong decision,” does that still hold true?
“Yes. I’m borrowing Bezos’ phrase to paraphrase my usual credo: ‘Focus on what you can do best and plug in the rest. ‘ If you start after you’ve done a complete review, it’s too late. Decide when you’re 70% ready, and fix the 30% that’s missing as you execute.
I think the success of our service lies in our methodology of building quickly and getting feedback from the market quickly to improve and fix things. If you try to start with 90%, 100% ready, the first thing that breaks is the opportunity.”
-The companyannounced its global expansion in July this year.
“Our solution is more competitive than global solutions domestically. We currently have more than 80% share in the SMB market. In the enterprise space, we are also competing with global companies.
Without us, overseas solutions would have dominated the domestic market, but now that our solutions have proven their value domestically, we are turning our attention to overseas markets. We are also strengthening our strategy to enter overseas markets together through alliances and partnerships with companies such as Microsoft (MS) and AWS by establishing a Japanese subsidiary.”
Based on his experience, Mr. Ji has co-authored books with experts in the AI field and written columns on digital transformation for the media. He is an independent director and an adjunct professor.
In particular, he loves giving talks. “I get a lot of enjoyment from speaking engagements where they need me and invite me,” he says. “It’s a way for me to prove and share what I know, which makes it even more meaningful.” The company holds monthly AX Leadership Forums to share practical management knowledge with C-levels that they need in the workplace.
You‘ve beenon theground floor of the IT revolution.
“In the late 1990s, after the Internet boom, the mobile era arrived. With the iPhone landing in Korea and the spread of wireless internet, we predicted that people would be doing their work on their mobiles rather than laptops or desktops, so we developed collaboration tools and groupware that were very successful at the time. By being proactive, we were able to increase the value and appreciation of our products in the ‘mobile-first, mobile-only’ era.”
-Now it’s AI.
“It’s another opportunity. IT seems like every decade there’s a big megatrend: PC, internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI. The pace of technology shaping the next megatrend seems to be picking up.”
-What are some of the principles and beliefs you hold dear as a leader?
“I think we need to be leaders who aim for organizational and individual growth. I have a weird habit. When I read a book or a report and it says, ‘For individual and organizational growth,’ I’ll change it to ‘organizational and individual growth. I think, ‘I’m prioritizing the organization more than the individual,’ because without the organization, how can the individual grow?
AI is all about the individual, which is a little different from individualism, but I put the organization first. When Ilzaler becomes the leader of the organization, I think he will think the same way as me. If the organization grows and the individual does not grow, is the organization sustainable, I think it may be a little difficult.
And if you’ve grown as an individual and the organization hasn’t grown, it means you haven’t contributed to the organization, you haven’t collaborated well, and that’s a very important principle and belief for me, that life is about organizational and personal growth. I think retirement age exists as a company system, as a social system, but if you don’t fulfill that belief or mission, then that’s when you retire.”
-John Bizon, CEO, The John Bizon Group
“We can’t say to ourselves, ‘We’re a good company, we’re a first-class company, we’re an AI company,’ it’s only meaningful if our customers recognize it. We have been a strong player in ERP and tax accounting software for a long time, but we have a long way to go compared to the valuation of global AI companies.
We’re a company that has developed a great AI engine, and we apply it to our products to create tools that maximize performance. That’s why we’re an ‘AI transformation’ (AX) company. There are companies that are good at developing AI foundation models, but we’re focused on applying AI to drive performance, efficiency, and productivity in the enterprise. That’s the essence of an AX company, and that’s our core value.”
(Mini-Interview)* Mr. Ji is a client who has been treated with Minish. After the interview, I asked him about Minish.
-What triggered the minish treatment.
“I met Jung Ho Kang, CEO of Minish Technology, at a CEO forum, and he was interested in our integrated system, so I was curious: ‘Minish is a dental company, how can they be so interested in IT?’ I tried to understand Minish.
I really connected with the philosophy and methodology of Minish treatment, and it’s a trifecta: safe treatment, healthy treatment, and aesthetic treatment, so I realized that a lot of famous people come here. At first, I thought the price was a bit high, but our chairman said, “It’s not that expensive if you divide the cost of the treatment by the number of years you’re going to use it,” and that changed my mind.”
-Dr. Kate, on what it was like to have the treatment
“I felt like I was born again. It really didn’t hurt, and a third of my teeth were crowned and filled, and I’d had a very long treatment in the past, and I was nervous about having to go through that again because of the aging of my teeth, and Minish offered me a solution to that problem.”
-Minnishfan
“As a patient who has experienced Minish, I feel like I’m now an evangelist for Minish. I think good care and healthy care is the best marketing, and it’s something I’ve never experienced in my life.”
