Special Lecture with Professors Kim Dae-sik and Kim Sang-kyun | Lee Eun-young, CEO of *Nano Venture*, on the Conditions for Talent in the AI Era
What should we learn in the AI era? This is one of the questions people type into search boxes most often these days.
On October 23 and 24, at The Seoul Lighthium at Galleria Forêt in Seoul Forest, an event was held to think through this question together and present solutions. It was the 2026 Seoul AI Lifelong Learning Running Ground, hosted by the Seoul Metropolitan Lifelong Education Promotion Agency. Under the theme "AI × Lifelong Learning, Where Learning Across All Generations Connects," it featured more than 30 experiences and expert lectures, and over two days several thousand citizens visited the venue.
The center of gravity of the event was the Insight Ground special lectures. On the first day, Professor Kim Dae-sik of KAIST, Professor Kim Sang-kyun of Kyung Hee University, and Gu Bon-kwon, director of the AI and Literacy Research Institute, took the stage. On the morning of the second day, on the same stage, Lee Eun-young, CEO of Uniquegood Company and co-author of *Nano Venture*, took over the microphone and continued her lecture on the conditions for talent in the AI era and organizational AX innovation.
Special lecture speakers, 2026 Seoul AI Lifelong Learning Running Ground
A lecture bringing the professors' questions into the field
Professor Kim Dae-sik covered how to prepare for the AGI era, and Professor Kim Sang-kyun covered the attitudes and learning methods of people who learn well in the AI era. Director Gu Bon-kwon spoke about the judgment to learn independently by questioning and verifying.
Lee Eun-young, CEO of Uniquegood Company and an author of *Nano Venture*, carried those questions over into companies and organizations. It was the story of a leader who personally went through a period in which organizations slowed down as they grew, and then rebuilt her organization with AI agents. The first slide of the lecture bore this question:
In the era of Nano Ventures, where one person leads 10,000 AIs, what must we learn?
From the book *Nano Venture*
In December 2025, at the Gyeongsangbuk-do Office of Education Future Education Expo, Lee Eun-young also took the stage alongside Lee Se-dol, UNIST special appointed professor, and Choi Tae-sung, author, for a special lecture on future education in the AI era. The reason the education field invited Lee Eun-young as a speaker when searching for answers for the AI era is that she had already experienced those answers first within her own organization, which is changing rapidly.
"Did you just think of AI?" A warning repeated for 200 years
The lecture opened with a fill-in-the-blank quiz.
When the ○○ era arrives, ○○ will completely replace human labor, hundreds of millions of workers will lose their jobs, and only a small elite will monopolize wealth.
Most people think of AI. The answer is the information age and computers. It is a prediction Jeremy Rifkin made in *The End of Work* in 1995. Thirty years later, instead of mass unemployment, new jobs such as developers, creators, and analysts have emerged, and an era has opened in which ordinary individuals earn money on platforms.
The same warning came during the British Luddite movement in 1811, and again when steam locomotives began running in 1825. Where coachmen's jobs disappeared, jobs with no names at all appeared, such as engineers, stationmasters, mechanics, conductors, signalmen, and train lunchbox vendors.
Lee Eun-young explained this repetition as "autocomplete." When people face something they do not know, they fill in the blanks with what they do know. Fear in the face of change is the same. It feels like a glimpse of the future, but in fact it is a familiar fear filling in the blanks. The first message of the lecture was that the total amount of work is not fixed, and that steam engines, computers, and the internet all ultimately grew the pie.
She also added one point. In front of AI, everyone from people in their twenties to executives stands on the same starting line, and the person who gains an advantage is the one who touches it first.
How should organizations be redesigned for the AI era?
In Ringelmann's tug-of-war experiment in 1913, if the force one person exerts alone is 100, then when eight people pull together, each person exerts 49. Communication lines between people grow as n(n-1)/2. With 10 people there are 45, and with 20 people there are 190.
Uniquegood Company also walked the same road. Outside, metrics accumulated: a Guinness World Records entry, selection as one of GITEX's Boldest 100, and cumulative users of 4 million. Inside, meetings, reporting, and coordination across departments were the greatest source of stress, and when someone proposed trying something new, the reply was, "It will take a lot of time, and we need to hire more people." Both co-CEOs were enduring a period in which they postponed surgery schedules several times.
Even when paid AI accounts were given to every employee, organizational productivity stayed the same. Specific individual tasks got faster, but indirect work of re-reviewing AI outputs grew, and an "illusion of AI productivity" appeared.
The biggest mistake Lee Eun-young identified was entrusting AI adoption and transformation to employees. Her point is that AX must be directly led by someone who understands and can control the flow of the whole organization. This passage also aligns with the trend Chey Tae-won, chairman of the SK Group, presented at the "2026 New Icheon Forum" this June, saying "we must evolve from my AI to our AI," and proposing a "one person, one agent" system.
So Uniquegood Company changed the order of work.
It removed the personal AIs that were scattered across each person's computer and sessions, and structured things so that all conversations, executions, and feedback pass through an agent.
Past the stage where people learn AI, the structure was designed so that AI learns our conversations and judgment. This structure is today's AXIT (axit.team).
People take on the role of instructing and commanding, while the agent legion handles execution such as planning, design, and development.
The change appeared concretely.
The menu board of RealWorld Seongsu, which had not been changed for three years, was newly made in a matter of days. The agent analyzed POS sales data, restructured the menu composition, and even produced images and videos.
Content and inventory management and customer inquiry response now run automatically, and sales are holding up well even without a store manager.
The blog, Notion, and homepage automatically sync in four languages.
A system that upgrades itself 50 times a day supports the company's operations.
What are the conditions for talent in the AI era?
In Anders Ericsson's research, the most important point is not the number 10,000 hours but the quality of that time.
Ten years of experience can be ten years of growth for one person, and for another it is one year of work repeated ten times.
"Discipline," which strives to get better than yesterday at the edge of one's limits, and "habitual repetition," which comfortably repeats what one has already mastered, look very similar on the surface. The more functional and professional the work, the easier it is to fall into the trap of repetition. When an organization stagnates, the "Dead Sea effect" appears, in which the most capable people leave first, and outliers who bring new tools across boundaries are told to "just do your own job well."
*Nano Venture*, Chapter 6, solves this problem through the way work is assigned. The reason employees resisted the new way was less the tool itself and more a desire to protect their identity as "designers." So instead of saying "You are a designer," they began saying, "This week, you are the owner of this problem."
The system takes on functions, and people take on problems. People change. But they change where the structure has changed.
People's time does not disappear; it moves. It moves into setting direction, designing judgment criteria, taking responsibility, judging people, and deciding what not to do. It moves from repetition to judgment, and from internal coordination to customers.
In the lecture, she also introduced the "four muscles" of talent in the AI era (thinking muscle, adaptation muscle, empathy muscle, body skill) presented by Chey Tae-won, chairman of the SK Group, in the KBS documentary *Insight: Talent War 2*. She then laid out the four muscles that *Nano Venture* identifies.
Lee Eun-young summarized what the four have in common this way: all of them are attitudes that we have long regarded as clichés.
Comments from members were also shared. "It feels like 100 people are working for me, so I often find myself looking back at my own shortcomings." "At first I wondered whether this would work, but now it's fun. I'm left with regret that I never tried more boldly each time." What we confirmed is a change in which employees who used to handle parts of the work have become leaders who move the whole of the work, just like CEOs.
Where should the direction of education in the AI era point?
The theme of the second part of the lecture was "The Future of Education: Offline Experience." Paradoxically, the more AI technology advances, the more an era of directly experienced learning arrives. Lee Eun-young showed that direction through cases that our company created.
The four cases share one commonality: they added experience content to spaces that already existed, without new buildings. A study published in April 2025 in the *Journal of Travel Research* by Professor Shin Hak-seung's research team of the Hanyang University School of Tourism also verified that gamification and AR experiences change visitors' attitudes and behavior.
A sentence is attached to the case of the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs: "We did not say 'Learn history.' We simply made people want to collect." The direction of education in the AI era lies here too. Direct hands-on experiences in which people sit face to face become the center of learning.
The conditions for entrepreneurs in the AI era: Nano Venture
In the United States, 470,000 new companies are founded every month, and one-person businesses in which the founder is the only employee are rapidly increasing. In an era when one person can manage 10,000 employees and build a business worth 1 trillion won, the upper limit on the scale one person can handle is disappearing.
The lecture also quoted Tom Blomfield of Y Combinator. The content was that the revenue per person of YC-backed companies grew fivefold in 18 months, and that the constraint would soon shift from headcount to token usage. A salary of 100 million won buys one person's 8 hours a day, 220 days a year. 100 million won in tokens buys hundreds of agents' 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Saving on AI costs may now be the same as saving on intelligence.
The trend is the same in Korea. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups unveiled 103 AI solutions for challengers to use in the second "Startup for Everyone" program, and the Ministry of Science and ICT announced it will release "AI for Everyone," a free AI service for all citizens, within this year. Tools will soon be given to everyone. The people who design those tools to move like a single organization, and who build small companies in which one person leads 10,000 AIs, are the AI-era entrepreneurs that *Nano Venture* describes.
Closing the lecture
What should we learn in the AI era? Lee Eun-young's answer was closer to attitude than to a list of new tools. It was the power to finish through to the end, flexibility not to be confined by roles, curiosity in the face of new technology, and a heart oriented toward people.
The lecture ended with the sentence "Full-speed AX, soaring again with Nano Venture." In an era when one person leads 10,000 AIs, what remains for people is ultimately to create experiences that only people can give.
About the authors of *Nano Venture*
Lee Eun-young, co-CEO of Uniquegood Company, is a co-author of *Nano Venture*. She founded Uniquegood Company in Seongsu-dong, Seoul in 2017 and leads Realworld, a playable content platform. She has created experience content set in experience spaces such as RealWorld Seongsu, as well as museums, closed schools, and Veterans Affairs historic sites. Her main lecture topics are full-speed AX, organizational redesign in the AI era, conditions for talent in the AI era, and talent development strategy for the AI era.
Song In-hyeok, co-CEO of Uniquegood Company, is a co-author of *Nano Venture*. He personally developed AXIT, a multi-agent orchestration platform, and uses it across the company's operations. He serializes a column on AI transformation and the future of work, "Unreplaceable," in JoongAng Ilbo's The Butter, and serves as a planning committee member for Creative X Seongsu. His main lecture topics are AX organizational design, agent organizational transformation, and Nano Venture.
The lectures by both authors in the second half of this year have included the presidential group of the SK Group SUPEX Council, SK Broadband, Hunet, Shinhan Square Bridge Daegu, the Korea MICE Association, KICEF 2026, and the Gongju Tourism Forum.
Frequently asked questions
Q. Who were the speakers of the special lecture at the 2026 Seoul AI Lifelong Learning Running Ground? Professor Kim Dae-sik of KAIST, Professor Kim Sang-kyun of Kyung Hee University, Gu Bon-kwon, director of the AI and Literacy Research Institute, and Lee Eun-young, CEO of Uniquegood Company and co-author of *Nano Venture*. It was held October 23–24 at the Insight Ground of The Seoul Lighthium in Seongdong-gu, Seoul.
Q. What is a Nano Venture? It refers to a small company in which one person commands an organization of AI agents to accomplish work at the scale of a large organization. It is the concept presented by co-CEOs Song In-hyeok and Lee Eun-young in the book *Nano Venture* (Human Cube, 2026).
Q. What are the conditions for talent in the AI era? *Nano Venture* identifies four muscles: need-to-close, flexibility, curiosity, and love. They are the power to complete things to the end, an attitude of not being confined to a role, an open mind to accept new technology, and a heart oriented toward people.
Q. Where should organizational redesign for the AI era begin? It begins by gathering scattered individual AI use into organizational AI. All conversations, executions, and feedback pass through agents, and the transition is directly led by a leader who sees the flow of the whole organization.
Q. How do I request a Nano Venture lecture? Send the organization name, target audience, desired schedule, and the challenge you are currently facing to create@uniquegood.biz.
Book information
*Nano Venture* by Song In-hyeok and Lee Eun-young | Human Cube | August 2026. It covers how small organizations can change the way they work to accomplish greater things together with AI agents, and it shares the experience of rebuilding an organization with AI agents amid a management crisis.
Thank you :)
https://www.nanoventure.org/