Woowa Brothers CEO Kim Bum-seok / Courtesy of Woowa Brothers

The new CEO of the country's largest food delivery platform operator, Woowa Brothers, said, Wednesday, he will make the online platform's services smarter by implementing delivery robots and artificial intelligence (AI).

Kim Bum-seok, who took office on Jan. 2, said he will invest more in the company's technological advancement. It is part of his plan this year to make the company and its flagship platform, Baedal Minjok, or Baemin, maintain its lead in the country's food delivery market with the latest technologies.

His goal is for Baemin to introduce an improved user interface (UI) that offers users broader choices of restaurants and menus. In his speech at the company's office inside Lotte World Tower in Seoul, he expressed dissatisfaction with Baemin's current UI.

"We must ask ourselves whether Baemin is prioritizing user experience, whether our users are truly finding the platform more convenient to use than other delivery apps," Kim said. The country's food delivery market is currently led by three major platforms: Baemin, Coupang Eats and Yogiyo.

"We must improve our platform's UI by focusing on enabling users to choose a restaurant and menu more easily and intuitively."

Kim also promised he would share a new partnership plan to cooperate with restaurant operators who use Baemin for taking online delivery orders within this month. He said a new tripartite agreement has been reached by Woowa Brothers, restaurant members of Baemin and the government for a better ecosystem of the food delivery industry, and the plan will kick off next month.

The three parties have been adjusting the proper amount of fees for restaurant operators using Baemin and discussing how to accommodate the restaurant operators with more benefits and when to execute the newly agreed system.

"I will keep paying attention to how the restaurant members of Baemin and riders who make deliveries can mutually grow within our ecosystem," Kim said.

"It is my goal this year to cement Baemin as a platform that boosts sales of its member restaurants, allows their businesses to operate more efficiently and helps the riders complete deliveries more safely."

Woowa Brothers, despite its No. 1 position in the market with Baemin which was launched in 2010, is seeing the No. 2 player, Coupang Eats, narrowing the gap. The number of app users and market shares both indicate the trend.

According to mobile data analyst IGAWorks, monthly active users for Coupang Eats reached over 9.62 million as of December, a 72.1 percent jump from the previous year. Baemin, on the other hand, saw the figure drop by 0.1 percent, or 19,021, to 22.43 million during the same period.

Coupang Eats also saw its market share increase to 25.7 percent from 13.7 percent during the period, while Baemin's figure dropped to below 60 percent.

Two keywords from Kim's latest speech were "customer" and "growth." He said he will "once again put the company on a growth orbit this year."