Beyond the Prompt: How Korea’s PR Industry Is Rethinking the Role of Expertise

We’ve spent the past year building one of South Korea’s most advanced AEO and GEO consulting practices. Here’s what we’ve learned — and where we’re headed next.

There is a question that every communications agency must now answer honestly: when AI can generate content, automate workflows, and optimize messaging at scale, what exactly is the agency’s role?

At HyperM, we’ve been wrestling with this question longer than most. We were among the first agencies in South Korea to formalize AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) as structured client services — helping brands ensure they are cited as authoritative sources when people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or any other AI-powered search tool a question that matters to their business. What started as a forward-looking experiment quickly became one of our fastest-growing practice areas, as the shift from portal-based search to conversational AI search accelerated far faster than even optimists predicted.

That experience taught us something important. The agencies that will thrive in this environment are not the ones that use AI most aggressively. They are the ones that know where AI ends and genuine human insight begins.

Introducing the AX Strategy: Two New C-Suite Roles, One Clear Direction

In March 2026, we announced the most significant leadership investment in our agency’s history, adding two new C-level positions built specifically around this conviction.

The first is the Chief Transformation Officer role, now held by Joon Kim, a 23-year veteran of the Korean PR industry and one of its most internationally recognized practitioners. Joon previously served as Managing Director at Ketchum Korea and Senior Vice President and Partner at FleishmanHillard Korea. Over the course of his career, he has received multiple local and international PR industry awards—reflecting not only technical expertise, but also a sustained track record of delivering high-impact outcomes in complex, high-stakes environments for global clients. He studied communications at Yonsei University and George Washington University, and brings deep cross-sector experience spanning technology, financial services, and consumer industries. His mandate as CTO is to lead what we call AX — AI Transformation — not just as a service offering for clients, but as a structural redesign of how HyperM itself operates. As Joon put it when he joined: “The harmony between AI and HI — Human Insights — will define the competitive edge of any agency going forward. My role as Chief Transformation Officer is to help clients see their challenges through a communications lens, and to develop stakeholder-specific solutions and narratives that are built on that judgment.”

The second is the Chief Narrative Officer role, now held by Jeong-hyun Byun, a communications professional whose career has spanned corporate communications at Samsung Heavy Industries, public affairs work as a government press secretary, and strategic PR for deep-tech startups navigating early-stage fundraising and growth. Jeong-hyun is also a prolific author — she has published six books under her pen name Byun Handa (변한다), which translates simply as “to change,” a name that reflects the thread running through all of her work: the human experience of transformation. Her most recent book explores the space where technology and human life intersect, and it is precisely that perspective — grounded in industry, sharpened by policy, and humanized by a writer’s instincts — that we wanted anchoring our narrative strategy. The CNO role reflects our belief that as AI floods the information environment with generated content, the scarcest and most valuable resource becomes a well-designed narrative: one that is true, emotionally resonant, and strategically coherent.

Why HI — Human Insights — Is the Real Differentiator

We use the term HI (Human Insights) deliberately, as a counterpart to AI. The argument is not that artificial intelligence is unimportant — it is transformative, and we are integrating it across our operations aggressively. The argument is that AI democratizes the tools of content production while doing almost nothing to democratize judgment, relationships, empathy, or contextual understanding. Those capabilities still reside in experienced people, and they are the true basis of competition in a world where AI-generated content is abundant and human-guided strategy is rare.

As I’ve said publicly: “In an environment where AI tools have become democratized, what ultimately determines an agency’s competitive strength is HI — the experience and insight of senior leaders. Following our strategic expansion into AEO and GEO consulting in 2025, our goal for 2026 is to combine AI’s agility with human creativity and become a genuinely AI-native agency.”

For clients, this translates into a specific value proposition. HyperM combines AI-driven efficiency — faster content production, more rigorous media monitoring, smarter data analysis — with the kind of senior-level strategic thinking that shapes how a brand is perceived not just this quarter, but over years. Our leadership structure is designed to deliver both: Harry Kim (Managing Director) overseeing issue management and crisis communications; Mina Jeong (CEO) driving B2B marketing and digital strategy; Susan Jung (Vice President) leading B2C and healthcare PR; Joon Kim (CTO) guiding AI transformation consulting; and Jeong-hyun Byun (CNO) architecting narrative strategy across client engagements.

What This Means for Brands Operating in Korea

South Korea’s business environment is uniquely high-context, with organizations navigating heightened uncertainty in an era shaped by permacrisis and polycrisis. The media landscape moves quickly, public opinion can shift dramatically in short cycles, and the pressure on brands — both domestic and multinational — to be credible, visible, and responsive is intense. At the same time, the transition to AI-powered search means that the strategies that determined brand visibility five years ago are being replaced faster here than almost anywhere else in the Asia-Pacific region.

We’ve also served for many years as the hub agency in Korea for a wide range of global brands — coordinating multi-market campaigns, aligning messaging across regions, and acting as the local strategic anchor for international communications programs. That experience has given us a distinctive fluency in how global agency networks operate, what they need from a local partner, and how to translate international brand standards into communications that genuinely work in the Korean market.

If you are a multinational brand operating in Korea, or a Korean company preparing to communicate in increasingly AI-mediated environments, the question of how your brand appears in AI-generated answers is no longer a niche technical concern. It is a core strategic question — and one we’ve spent years learning how to answer.

HyperM is a Seoul-based PR and integrated marketing agency with over 24 years of experience serving technology, consumer, healthcare, and financial sector clients across the Korean market. To learn more about our AEO and GEO consulting services, contact us at Enquiry@hyperm.co.kr