Hyundai Card Pits Its PR Team Against AI in a Blind Draft-Off: Human Wins Round One, but the Real Goal Was Learning
Hyundai Card Pits Its PR Team Against AI in a Blind Draft-Off: Human Wins Round One, but the Real Goal Was Learning #
South Korea’s Hyundai Card ran a structured internal experiment to test where generative AI improves its media communications work and where it falls short of an experienced human writer.
The exercise, held at the company’s Seoul headquarters, was framed as a competition: a former journalist on Hyundai Card’s PR staff and an AI model were each asked to write a press release for “the Orange,” a new premium card the company launched earlier this year. Employees then reviewed both drafts in a blind test, judging them on message structure, logical flow and overall clarity, not on sentence-level polish alone.
The human writer came out on top in the first round, according to the company’s account of the results. One notable difference in method: the PR employee drew on internal sources and conducted direct interviews, while the AI assembled its draft from externally available information. Some employees who reviewed the AI-generated version said the benefit-listing style made the text feel machine-like, even when they could not immediately identify which version was human.
Hyundai Card said its goal was never simply to declare a winner. According to the company, the test gave its communications team a structured opportunity to review prompt-writing techniques, AI-assisted editing workflows and smarter approaches to research. A company spokesperson said the competition format generated stronger employee engagement and turned up useful feedback on where human output could be sharpened to match AI’s speed and consistency.
The PR office now plans to run comparable tests across a broader range of content, including domestic press materials, overseas communications and scripts for YouTube productions.
The exercise is part of Hyundai Card’s broader AX (AI Transformation) programme, one of the more visible internal AI rollouts in South Korean financial services. The company has run hands-on large language model training sessions with around 260 senior leaders and extended the programme to several hundred additional employees, with sessions covering prompt engineering, document summarisation, Excel automation and vibe coding for prototype web applications. Vice Chairman and CEO Ted Chung participated in the training personally, a deliberate top-down approach that differs from the working-level focus more common at Korean organisations.
For the PR team, the exercise moves AI from a curiosity to a working tool across the communications process, with the blind-test format designed to ground that adoption in direct evidence.
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