Korean civil servants build their own AI apps and share them in-house

South Korea's civil servants have stopped waiting for outside contractors to build their software. At the Intellectual Property Office and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, employees are writing their own work applications with plain-language prompts and pooling them on internal app stores.

The Intellectual Property Office opened its AI App Market, gathering tools staff built through conversational coding, the practice of directing a generative model in natural language to write and revise code. Its showcase tool is K-SUITE, a patent-examination assistant that summarises inventions, generates prior-art search queries and analyses the results. A patent examiner identified only as Examiner A said the tool found highly relevant prior-art materials more efficiently and helped raise examination quality. A second tool, an external-network examination document viewer, uses the KIPRIS Plus API so an application number pulls the relevant documents into a single screen; Examiner B said the once-cumbersome review process had become far more efficient. Other entries include an examination-history reader paired with an AI assistant examiner, an LLM SideChat that lets reviewers question a model while reading patent documents, a tool for collecting and formatting requested materials, and Gov.AX Insight, a platform for analysing government AI press releases.

At the Interior Ministry, the same instinct produced Kukjeong ON, a service that monitors live broadcasts of the National Assembly and Cabinet meetings. Instead of watching continuously for a mention of a policy, agency or programme, officials receive an alert when their keywords come up, with key remarks sorted by topic and later checked against official minutes. Kim Min, a deputy director in the ministry's public AI innovation division, said he wanted to ease the burden of watching broadcasts while waiting for relevant remarks. Hwang Kyu-chul, head of the ministry's AI government office, said the tool matters because a civil servant who understands the work improved a real inconvenience directly, and he hoped such attempts would spread through the public service.

The guardrails are forming alongside the enthusiasm. The Korea Employment Information Service, under the Employment and Labor Ministry, received an AI ethics compliance mark from the National Information Society Agency, which grants it to institutions that establish their own AI ethics principles and put staff through ethics training. The service declared AI employment-service ethics principles in December 2025, built on four values it lists as human-centredness, social value, trust and fairness, plus 10 ethical rules, ahead of the AI Basic Act taking effect in January 2026. It trained all employees on the law, AI literacy and ethics this year. Director Lee Chang-soo said the mark formally confirms the institution uses AI responsibly.

Separately, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety said its dietary safety guide for children with rare diseases, drawn up after a public suggestion, reached the main round of the 2026 Government Innovation Championship. The interior ministry, which runs the contest, said 41 cases advanced from 546 submissions across 254 institutions, with 25,657 people joining the online citizen evaluation, 16.6 percent more than last year.