Digital & AI Transformation in Energy & Chemical Industry

GGS Caltex has seized the wave of digital transformation and boldly pursued innovation since 2019. The company established a DX Strategy Team in 2019 and began full-scale digital transformation at its Yeosu plant in 2021, implementing various digital and AI use cases on-site. Furthermore, starting this year, the company is pursuing a new paradigm called "DAX (Digital & AI Transformation)," which combines digital transformation (DX) with AI transformation (AX).

Under the philosophy that "data is the essence of industry," GS Caltex is building a digital transformation foundation that collects, refines, and processes data that extends beyond factory data to encompass markets and customers.

GS Caltex's direction is to become an "AI Factory" 2 , representing the manufacturing industry's AI transformation, by incorporating AI technology into its work methods. Ji Dong-han, team leader of GS Caltex's Digital Lab, explained, "If the existing DX was a process of establishing a digital foundation for data, systems, and organizational culture, DAX is about completely transforming work processes and working methods by actively utilizing AI across all operations. Through this, AI can help employees immediately achieve what they want, and the core of DAX is to advance the entire company's productivity to a revolutionary level."

AX platform "MISO" and the AI ​​platform "AiU"

There 's the group-wide integrated AX platform "MISO" and the AI ​​platform "AiU" developed directly by GS Caltex using it . AiU is a low-code, no-code in-house AI agent development platform that allows any employee to easily create AI tools (chatbots, automated agents, etc.) without specialized development knowledge. By connecting data from each department and process to AiU, projects that previously relied on external developers have quickly transitioned to field-led initiatives.

In fact, "AhnGenbot," which took a professional developer three months to develop, was implemented by field employees in just two weeks this year as a TBM AI secretary. Currently, AiU is a platform used by 2,713 people per month. Considering that GS Caltex has approximately 3,000 employees, this means that almost all employees are using AiU to improve productivity. In this way, AI has become an "everyday tool" rather than a "special project," and innovation is rapidly spreading throughout the organization through standard operating procedures (SOPs), standards, and the dissemination of positive experiences.

Digital Academy for internal capabilities

Through the Digital Academy, we directly trained field talent as data analysts and citizen developers. During the first phase of DX (2019-2023), we repeatedly implemented rapid pilot tests using an agile approach, produced a prototype within three months, and established a "Single Source of Truth" (SSOT) system based on production planning data.

During this process, approximately 60 employees received 12 weeks of full-time training and developed their development capabilities. In the past year alone, 1,392 people completed generative AI training, and employees developed dashboards and AI tools on their own, rather than relying on external experts, establishing a problem-solving culture centered on internal capabilities.

Leadership Support & Governance innovation

There was full leadership support and governance innovation. CEO Heo Se-hong personally coined the term "DAX" and encouraged the company to actively integrate AI capabilities with its unique domain knowledge and technical expertise, thereby fueling change. The company's executives, including CEO Heo, personally experienced three to four hours of digital and AI training to increase organizational receptivity and implemented a governance system that enabled rapid decisions on budgets, priorities, and management of change (MOC). Eun-ju Lee, Director of the DX Center, explained, "Leaders' willingness to understand and implement AI is significantly reducing organizational resistance and fostering the internalization of capabilities."

In addition, GS Caltex has actively built a data lake 4 as a core infrastructure for its digital and AI transformation . A data lake is a large-scale repository that centralizes all data generated from field facilities, processes, markets, and customers in their original form. This allows anyone to extract, analyze, and model previously dispersed data in real time.

Learn more about DAX case studies

GS Caltex's Yeosu plant has steadily pursued digital transformation since 2019, resulting in over 200 cumulative use cases. Thirty-eight of these were implemented in 2023, and this number surged to 140 in 2024. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, 72 new use cases were identified, generating more than one new improvement proposal per week (approximately 1.4 per week).