A program with no one in the studio
Hyundai Home Shopping announced that it will air on Monday at 15:20 its first regularly scheduled sales program produced entirely with artificial intelligence, according to The Korea Herald. The product at the center of the broadcast is Jeju Heart Gold kiwis, and the channel involved is Hyundai Home Shopping PLUS#, the retailer's data home shopping network.
The system is called AI-REAL and, according to the company, generates the entire broadcast without human hosts and without camera filming. Hyundai Home Shopping claims that this is a first for the teleshopping sector and specifies that previous uses of AI in the industry involved individual scenes or individual presenters, not the entire program.
The stated reasons: showing what the camera does not capture
According to the company, AI-REAL is intended to make product information easier to understand by depicting details that are difficult to film, such as the condition of the soil in which crops grow and how goods are distributed. The system can generate these images without dedicated filming services or physical props.
In the recent trial cited by the company, the costs incurred by participating suppliers for preparing samples, producing additional videos and related expenses fell by at least 80 percent compared with traditional production. Sales, again according to Hyundai Home Shopping, reached 120 percent of the target. These are figures reported by the company and not independently verified.
The statements and expansion plans
Lim Soo-jin, head of television production at Hyundai Home Shopping, said viewers judged the broadcast to be as natural as one hosted by a human presenter and that information on growing conditions and cooking examples helped them decide whether to buy. Lim Hyun-tae, head of channel strategy, explained that AI-REAL was developed to support small suppliers and offer customers a different shopping experience, with the intention of extending the use of AI to its own operations.
The retailer plans at least one AI-generated program per month, starting with fruit and vegetables, meat and fish, then gradually expanding to categories such as processed foods and household items, where, according to the company, smaller suppliers have shown strong interest in selling through the network.
What remains to be verified
The material does not indicate how AI-REAL handles any errors or misleading information on air, nor whether regulators or consumers have raised objections. It is also unclear which products and what time frame were used to measure the trial's cost savings and sales results. Monday's debut will be the system's first public and regular test.
