The Chairmen Who Came to See Him Off
"I didn't think you'd be able to make it."
"This department meeting is that important."
If anyone found out he had skipped a presidential banquet to sit in this room, they would have been stunned. The chairmen of the country's largest conglomerates were supposedly craning their necks at this very hour for a chance to meet Nail Nehru.
"Alright. Let's hear it. What kind of business would you like our Kiseong IT Business Planning Team to take on? Dig out whatever you've been brainstorming."
At Jung Jinwoo's words, Ji Jeong-eun and Lee Ki-seok glanced at each other and gave a small nod. So they had prepared something after all.
"Sir, take a look at this. It's a brief proposal."
Ji Jeong-eun handed the documents across to Jung Jinwoo. Five pages — a notebook with ideas sketched out in broad strokes.
An AI Guider for individuals.
An AI Guider for enterprises.
The title alone was enough to grasp the general direction. A proposal stripped of all fluff, nothing but the concept itself.
"I've got the gist. Go ahead and walk me through it."
At Jung Jinwoo's prompting, Ji Jeong-eun nodded toward Lee Ki-seok.
"As you know, new AI is coming out practically every day. Large language models, small language models — they're pouring in. Multimodal AI is here, and artificial general intelligence, AGI, won't be far behind."
There's not a person alive who doesn't know that.
"The pace of change is so fast that most people have no idea which AI they should even be using. Individuals just pick a few famous ones, and most companies simply leave it to their employees to figure out on their own."
"So?"
"We're proposing to guide companies so they can actually use the AI that matches the direction they want."
"Which would mean you'd have to know every AI that's flooding the market, and keep pace with technology that's advancing by the day."
"Deputy Manager Lee Ki-seok has been interested in that field for years — he's been collecting information the whole time. If he takes the lead, it should be more than possible."
Ji Jeong-eun stepped in to back him, then continued.
"When a company comes to Kiseong IT for a website, we attach an AI guide tailored to that company's character — and we upgrade it on a regular schedule. An education company gets education-specialized AI. A fashion house gets image-generation AI. A construction firm gets AI for architectural design and new materials. Every industry already has specialist models of its own; we just connect them. The world is changing at a sprint, and most small and mid-sized companies don't even know whether the AI they need exists. We'd be the ones to show them."
For an individual, using a handful of well-known models was enough. But every industry had its own particular terrain. And out of the open-source models released by global giants like Gugoel and OffAI, a host of startups were already building AI specialized for those individual fields. The problem was that most small and mid-sized companies had no idea which of those models they even needed.
It was a solid idea. Bundle it with the existing website-development package, and it would sell itself.
"Give it a shot. Work out the pricing, and plan it as a package bundled with our website development. Then the two of you will report it directly to Director Ki Dong-chan and CEO Choi Tae-min."
Ji Jeong-eun and Lee Ki-seok stared at him, bewildered.
"You're not going to present it yourself, sir?"
"You two put in the work. You two came up with the plan. So you two should present it."
"Ah, sir…"
"Sir, really… haah."
Why are they so moved? What's there to be moved about with something like this? Even if I wanted to take it, I couldn't be bothered. I've got a mountain of things I actually have to do. Wait — did they actually see me as someone who'd steal a proposal his own people worked hard on?
"I… I really didn't know you at all, sir."
You already had this exact moment last time. Deputy Manager Lee Ki-seok, I don't particularly care for revivals.
"See? I told you so! Our department head is incredible…"
Ji Jeong-eun grinned as if to say she'd been right all along. She wasn't a kindergartener bragging about her father.
"That said, when you present to the CEO and the Director, you'll need to plan it more thoroughly. Those two are old-school — complete amateurs when it comes to AI."
First-generation IT warriors, they called themselves, and yet they seemed to know next to nothing about the AI industry. When he'd told them personal agents could be onboarded onto phones, hadn't one of them asked if he meant embedded? The meanings were close enough, to be fair.
"Yes. We'll prepare it more carefully. Once it's finished, please take a look, sir."
"Sure. I will."
I'll at least check it for typos. They're both outstanding people, after all. Who do you think Ji Jeong-eun learned from? She trained under Deputy Manager Lee Ki-seok as her senior — that's why she's so sharp.
The airport VIP lounge. Men who had arrived with full entourages sat watching one another with thinly veiled wariness.
"Chairman Lee… let's all just get along and make a living, shall we? Did you really have to come all the way out here? You're the undisputed number one in this country's business world."
Koo Hyung-bal, chairman of MG Electronics, grumbled. At the next table, Chairman Lee Daeyoung of Saengsong Group let out a dry chuckle.
"Of course we should all get along. We still have to observe proper courtesy toward a guest, don't we?"
"Why so desperate? I hear Saengsong phones are in a slump in India these days. You think a product that's already tanked is going to start selling again just because of that?"
Jung Sang-chul, chairman of Gyeondae Motors, sitting one seat over, said it with a sneer, but Lee Daeyoung's face remained smiling.
"As I said. It is simply courtesy toward a guest."
"Courtesy, my foot. So that's why you rushed over three days early for Anjali Nehru's wedding? Come on, drop the act and let's be honest."
Choi Dae-hyun, chairman of SA Telecom, grumbled from a table a little farther off. Anjali Nehru — Nail Nehru's younger sister. Chairman Lee Daeyoung of Saengsong had arrived three full days before the ceremony, which had made every other chaebol chairman who showed up on the day itself look late by comparison.
"That was because I had a personal relationship, and business to attend to. Chairman Choi Dae-hyun, I believe you went there without even being invited."
"Ahem! Ahem! What nonsense…"
Choi Dae-hyun tried to brush it off, but everyone in the room already knew. SA's core businesses were telecom and semiconductors — there was nothing in India for them to grab. Choi Dae-hyun had gone all the way there, uninvited, hoping to get in Nail Nehru's good graces so he could push into Indian construction. He had come home empty-handed.
"You're all working so very hard. Yes, that's the strength of Korean companies, isn't it — diligent, sincere, and tenacious… Hahaha."
Shin Kwonho, chairman of Nodae Group, snickered as he said it.
"You talk as if you didn't come here to suck up yourself. Hahaha."
"Suck up? What sucking up…"
He said it, but every face in the room was looking at him with the same mocking smile. They all knew one another's minds as if they were reading their own palms.
Build a relationship with Nail Nehru, and a market of 1.4 billion Indians opened like a door. Sell a thousand-won piece of candy — just one to each of those 1.4 billion people — and you were looking at 1.2 trillion won. This was not China, a one-party communist dictatorship that swung laws and regulations however it pleased. And India's prime minister, for all the title, held little real power. The country was fragmented in practice: every state had different laws, even different languages. But if you could just get Nail Nehru — chairman of the Anandi Group — in your corner, you could do business across the whole of India without being jerked around by the games of corrupt bureaucrats and local politicians.
That was why the chairmen of Korea's top five conglomerates, from first to fifth, were sitting in an airport VIP lounge at dawn, waiting to see Nail Nehru off.
"Why isn't he coming? Don't tell me he went to the diplomatic lounge? Chairman Koo, you know anything?"
A man of Nail Nehru's caliber could use the diplomatic VIP lounge whether he was a diplomat or not. Jung Sang-chul of Gyeondae Motors put the question to Koo Hyung-bal, but Koo only shook his head — he didn't know either.
An airport staff member happened to walk past Koo Hyung-bal's table. Koo caught him by the arm.
"Nail Nehru is definitely coming this way, yes? It's five in the morning. Why isn't he here?"
"Ah — Chairman Nail Nehru? His private jet was delayed to one in the afternoon. You didn't know?"
"What?"
"What do you mean, delayed?"
"At last night's banquet he clearly said five-thirty this morning…"
The VIP lounge dissolved into confusion. At the banquet he had clearly said the five-thirty flight. The swarm of reporters waiting outside the lounge, photographing every chaebol chairman as he walked in, was proof enough of that.
"Ah, this is humiliating… Why did this Nail Nehru suddenly change his schedule…"
The chairmen of Korea's first through fifth largest conglomerates had come out at dawn without even sleeping, to see Nail Nehru off — and now they were going home empty-handed.
"Haa… Is there another exit? I can't walk out like this. It's too embarrassing."
You didn't even need to look to know the picture. The press would take the photos and mock them as the chaebol chairmen who came to see him off and got stood up. Not one of them wanted to be permanently immortalized as one of those.
Chairman Lee Daeyoung of Saengsong Group whispered something to the airport staff, then headed off somewhere with them.
"Sly fox, as always. Let's follow Chairman Lee."
The faith that if anyone could find a back door even in a moment like this, it would be Saengsong.
"What are you doing? Let's go."
The chaebol chairmen and their entourages all rushed, in a single clattering herd, toward the place where Chairman Lee Daeyoung of Saengsong had disappeared.
An empty morning. Beneath the building, guarded only by security personnel, a subtle tension hung in the air.
"Alright. Everyone out."
The security chief glanced at his watch, and the officers melted away. A car pulled up in front of the building. A man in a bucket hat, wearing loose, draping clothes that hid the shape of his body, stepped out and walked inside.
"Welcome. This way, please."
A burly, bearded man — Manager Jeon Gwang-jin — guided the man in the bucket hat through the entrance and toward the elevator. They rode in silence until the car stopped at the twenty-fourth floor. Jeon Gwang-jin opened the security door, then swept a hand toward the interior.
"He's waiting for you. Please go in."
The man in the bucket hat stepped quietly through.
Nail Nehru. Chairman of the Anandi Group. The most powerful man in India — and a man who was, if anything, even more revered in Korea than in his own country — walked into the JW Building 24th Floor Lab.
"Thank you for coming all this way. Welcome."
Jung Jinwoo greeted Nail Nehru with a bow. Unusually, he was using formal speech. Only yesterday he had been talking down to the man as if he were a servant. Beside Jung Jinwoo, an older man and a younger one stood and bowed their heads as well.
Being summoned back and forth since before dawn had left Nail Nehru a little angry, but compared with the icy wind that had blown through the day before, his expression had softened considerably.
"Thank you for the invitation."
The words, at least, were courteous.
"Before we talk in earnest, there's something I'd like you to see first. This way, please."
Oh Gong-tae led Nail Nehru toward a security door further inside.
"I've thoroughly researched Dive-in."
At that, one corner of Oh Gong-tae's mouth lifted.
"Seeing it once beats researching it a hundred times. And experiencing it once beats seeing it a hundred times. Come on."
Nail Nehru looked at Jung Jinwoo. Jung Jinwoo nodded. Following Oh Gong-tae through, they found a bank of monitors and three simulators.
"This way, please."
Oh Gong-tae fitted an HMD over Nail Nehru's eyes, then dressed him in a sensor-equipped chest harness and gloves.
"I've done plenty of virtual reality. I know it well."
"Virtual reality? Haha… Please put the shoes on as well."
It isn't virtual reality? He couldn't understand why Oh Gong-tae was laughing. An HMD, a sensor-lined chest harness, gloves, and now shoes — that was virtual reality.
"This was prepared especially for you, Chairman Nail Nehru. Please — step into the fantasy world of India."
Everywhere was a sea of fire. People with their bodies aflame tumbled across the ground. Swords and spears punched through flesh; blood sprayed as men tore into one another.
This… this is…
He was standing in the middle of the battlefield from India's greatest Bollywood hit — the epic fantasy Baahubali.
He was on horseback. A long spear filled both of his hands. The horse was already charging — straight into the heart of the horde of enemies rushing at him with swords and spears, a tide of steel and screaming men.
"This… this is impossible…"
A gasp of wonder burst from Nail Nehru's lips. He had become Prabhas — the hero of the epic fantasy film Baahubali.