Interior ministry opens AI challenge to turn civil servants' tools into government-wide services

South Korea's interior ministry said Wednesday it will accept entries until Nov. 11 for a contest that challenges civil servants to build artificial intelligence tools for their own administrative work.

The 2026 Public AI Transformation Challenge will hold its finals on Nov. 25 at the Government Innovation Expo at KINTEX in Goyang. Civil servants at central and local governments and employees of public institutions are eligible, with 23 awards to be given, including a presidential prize and a prime ministerial prize, and total prize money of 17.2 million won ($12,952).

As of Oct. 8, 1,086 projects had been registered on the AI Government Lab public repository, with about 2,700 people taking part, but most have remained individual experiments. The challenge is intended to move that activity toward a structure in which individuals experiment and institutions operate the results.

Competition will run across three sessions. In the AI Government Lab Championship, officials may submit AI tools that address public problems such as improving services for citizens, raising administrative efficiency or tackling social issues, with no restriction on the form the output takes. The AI Mission section asks teams to choose one of three set tasks — a handover tool, an office administration assistant or an agent for drafting and revising regulations — and build a tool that reduces the burden of real work. The third session, for independent AI agents, uses a domestically developed AI served on the ministry's work network, with contestants creating work agents using only prompts and no coding.

Teams that pass the preliminary round will present and demonstrate the tools they built at the finals. Detailed information is available on the ministry's website.

"Through this contest, we will institutionalize the creative experiments of civil servants on the ground as government-wide public goods and give full support so that they lead to administrative innovation that citizens can feel, moving beyond bureaucratic inertia," said Hwang Kyu-cheol, director-general of the ministry's AI government office.

Generative AI and conversational coding, in which a person instructs an AI in everyday language to build a program without professional development knowledge, have produced a growing number of cases of civil servants making their own tools, the ministry said.