“Build apps in a snap, even without programmers”... Ministry of Intellectual Property launches employee-developed AI app store

[Financial News] Employees at the Ministry of Intellectual Property have embarked on administrative innovation, using artificial intelligence (AI) to build work-related apps themselves and share them with one another, without relying on professional programmers or outsourced development. It is an example of a “bottom-up AI ecosystem” being implemented in the public sector, with frontline civil servants creating AI apps themselves and spreading them across the organization.
The Ministry of Intellectual Property said on the 20th that it had launched the “Ministry of Intellectual Property AI App Store,” where employees can use AI to solve problems in their work directly and share and use the resulting AI apps across the organization.
The launch of the AI app store is seen as significant because it marks the creation by a government ministry of an autonomous, bottom-up AI ecosystem that goes beyond simply serving as a software collection portal and proceeds from identifying ideas in the field, to employees developing AI apps themselves, to sharing and spreading them through the app store.
As advances in generative AI have fueled the spread of “vibe coding,” which enables programs to be created using natural-language instructions alone, the Ministry of Intellectual Property quickly applied the approach to administrative work. Previously, improving work processes required separate outsourced IT projects and several months of development. Now, examiners and other staff who know the work best can build and deploy the apps they need themselves within days. This saves the time and money spent on external development while reflecting frontline needs in real time.
The app store currently hosts and sees active use of outstanding apps that have greatly streamlined the patent examination process. One example, “Patent Examination Assistant (K-SUITE),” links invention summaries, the creation of prior-art search queries, and analysis of search results to improve examination quality. Another, the “External Network Examination Document Lookup Tool,” lets users retrieve key examination documents in bulk and compare them on one screen with a single entry of an application number, substantially reducing manual work.
“In an era of sweeping AI transformation, the key is not just to use AI effectively, but for employees who know the problems in the field best to create and share AI themselves,” said Kim Yong-sun, Commissioner of the Ministry of Intellectual Property. “We will build a virtuous-cycle ecosystem, centered on the AI app store, in which successful cases spread across the organization, and dramatically boost productivity in intellectual property administration.”
The initiative is also expected to help accelerate digital transformation (DX) in the public sector by moving away from a system-development approach that has relied on IT departments or outside contractors and enabling frontline civil servants to become producers of digital tools themselves. The Ministry of Intellectual Property plans to strengthen the pre-deployment security review process for programs submitted to the app store and establish data-standardization guidelines, continually enhancing a stable environment for AI use.
[email protected] Kim Won-jun Reporter