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

The Korea Intellectual Property Office said it has opened an internal marketplace for artificial intelligence applications written by its own employees, a shift toward what the agency calls bottom-up innovation in which staff solve their own workflow problems instead of commissioning outside developers.

The app store, announced by Commissioner Kim Yong-sun, collects the tools employees have built using conversational, or "vibe," coding — instructing a generative AI model in natural language rather than writing code by hand. The office said the goal is a cycle in which problems are identified on the shop floor, applications are built by the people who understand the work, and the results are shared across the organization.

That approach replaces the older route of building separate systems through formal IT projects, which the office said should sharply cut the time and cost of outside development.

The flagship entry is K-SUITE, a patent-review assistant that summarizes inventions, generates search queries for prior art and analyzes search results. A patent examiner who used it said the tool made it easier to find relevant material when searching prior art and helped raise examination quality by allowing a review of prior art based on more thorough search results.

A second tool, the external-network examination document viewer, uses the KIPRIS Plus API to pull the main documents needed for an examination with a single entry of an application number, then displays them side by side on one screen. An examiner said the ability to retrieve and compare documents at once had made reviewing them far more efficient.

Kim, the commissioner, said the priority in the AI transition is not simply using the technology well. "In the era of the AI transformation, it is important for the employees who know field problems best to build AI themselves and for the whole organization to use it together," he said. He added that the office will build a virtuous cycle in which staff ideas become real workflow improvements and good practices spread across the agency.