Korea Intellectual Property Office opens AI app marketplace for staff-built tools

The Korea Intellectual Property Office said it has opened an internal AI app marketplace where employees share work tools they build themselves, moving away from commissioning outside developers to solve problems in patent examination and other operations.

The marketplace collects apps made with conversational, or "vibe," coding, in which a user instructs a generative AI model in natural language instead of writing code. The office said the shift replaces a model in which upgrades required separate information-technology projects with a bottom-up approach in which front-line staff identify a problem and build the tool for it. Previously, improving work processes required building separate systems through information-technology projects; now field staff identify problems and build the apps they need with AI, the office said, cutting the time and cost of external development and letting requirements from the field be reflected quickly. The office is led by Commissioner Kim Yong-sun.

The most prominent tool shared so far is K-SUITE, an AI assistant that consolidates tasks performed during patent examination, including summarizing an invention, generating search queries for prior art and analyzing the results. An examiner identified only by the surname A said the tool had made prior-art searching more efficient. "I could find highly relevant materials more efficiently when searching for prior art, and reviewing prior art on the basis of solid search results has been a great help in raising examination quality," the examiner said.

A second tool, the external-network examination document viewer, uses the KIPRIS Plus API to pull the main documents needed for examination with a single entry of an application number and display them side by side on one screen. "Being able to retrieve the documents I need at once and compare and check them immediately on a single screen has made reviewing examination documents far more efficient," said an examiner identified by the surname B.

The office said the apps identified so far reduce unnecessary manual work and make searching and analyzing materials more efficient, helping staff focus on their core professional duties.

"In the era of the AI transformation, it is important not only to use AI well but for the employees who know the problems in the field best to build AI themselves and for the whole organization to use it together," Kim said. He said the office aims to build a virtuous cycle in which staff ideas become real work improvements and strong cases spread across the organization, sharply raising the productivity of intellectual property administration.