​AI technology is evolving beyond generating information into the era of Agentic AI, where systems autonomously plan and act within digital environments. In this keynote, I will discuss the development journey of LG AI Research's flagship foundation model, EXAONE, and introduce the technical foundation of the recently unveiled K-EXAONE. Building on this, I will illustrate how our AI technologies are applied to solve real-world problems. Specifically, I will cover enterprise agents like ChatEXAONE and practical AI deployments across various industry verticals, including production management, customer service, and financial decision-making. Furthermore, I will share a few examples of our efforts in AI for Science, demonstrating how AI can serve as a powerful R&D partner in expert domains such as chemistry and life sciences to accelerate research efficiency. The talk will then delve into our research on agents acting in interactive environments, such as Web and Computer Use Agents, focusing on efforts to address core challenges in visual grounding, reasoning, and long-horizon planning. I will conclude by sharing my experiences in academia and industry to offer perspectives and advice for students navigating their paths in this rapidly evolving field.​

​Honglak Lee is currently co-Head and Chief Scientist of LG AI Research and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Google Research, Brain Team. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, advised by Prof. Andrew Ng. His research focuses on deep learning, representation learning, multimodal learning, reinforcement learning, and generative AI, which encompass large language models, vision-language models, AI agents, and AI for scientific discovery. His methods have been successfully applied to computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, and biomedical healthcare. He received the Best Application Paper Award at ICML, the Test of Time Award at RSS, and the Social Impact Award at NAACL. He has served as an Action Editor for JMLR and an Associate Editor for IEEE TPAMI. He has also served as a Senior Area Chair or Area Chair for major AI conferences, including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, and IJCAI. He is a recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award, NSF CAREER Award, and was selected as one of "AI's 10 to Watch" by IEEE Intelligent Systems and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He is a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Engineering in Korea.​