Nearly half of South Korean manufacturing conglomerates with 500 or more employees have adopted physical AI, compared with about 1% of small and medium-sized manufacturers, according to figures presented at a Seoul seminar. Experts said smaller firms must secure factory-floor data within roughly three years to compete in the AI transformation. The Korea Federation of SMEs and the Ministry of Economy and Finance convened about 200 officials, business representatives and academics to discuss AI agent commerce and AI and robotics. Speakers urged companies to capture discarded operational data, begin with one problematic production process and standardize information for joint projects. Proposed support included GPU infrastructure, manufacturing foundation models, regionally tailored AI programs, cooperative regulatory sandboxes, AI factories and participation by SMEs in a won-based stablecoin and the data-driven K-Ontology project.