Interior ministry launches youth AI service team

The interior ministry said Wednesday it launched a youth support team that will use artificial intelligence to tackle everyday inconveniences in public services, with 50 young people selected nationwide taking part.

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety held a launch ceremony in Seoul for the Youth Public AX Supporters, a program it runs with the National Information Society Agency. Kim Min-jae, the ministry's vice minister, and Kim Hyung-chul, president of the agency, attended alongside the participants.

The supporters, drawn from across the country and organized into 10 teams, will work with civil servants and outside experts to identify problems in public services and build improvements themselves. Their backgrounds extend beyond information technology and software to administration, economics, health and education, the ministry said.

Participants will propose ideas based on difficulties they have encountered in daily life, then review each project's necessity and feasibility with civil servants and experts. They will build prototypes using conversational coding, in which users describe what they want to an AI system in plain language, and test whether the results actually reduce inconvenience. The ministry pointed to services that pull information scattered across several agencies into one place, or that present complicated application procedures in a form users can follow.

The program extends the ministry's AI Government Lab, which supports civil servants in solving administrative problems directly with artificial intelligence. The ministry said combining officials' workplace experience with young people's user perspective widens the scope for improving public services.

"Innovation in public services begins with finding and fixing the small inconveniences citizens feel in daily life," Vice Minister Kim said. "We will add civil servants' field experience to young people's fresh perspective, experiment with AI-driven solutions, and support them so the work leads to changes citizens can feel."

The ministry is providing subscriptions to coding tools and development environments, along with mentoring from civil servants and exchanges with AI professionals. The first part of the ceremony introduced the supporters and presented their appointment letters, followed by a career talk with AI practitioners.

The teams will identify, build and verify their projects from October through December. Outstanding projects will be announced and awarded in January.