Starting in August, artificial intelligence (AI) will draft the minutes of civil servant disciplinary committee meetings. Tasks that previously took officials hours to complete by hand—writing minutes, resolutions and organizing supporting materials—will now be handled by AI in seconds to minutes. The government plans to full-scale its "AI by Design" administration, beginning with an AI service developed directly by frontline civil servants.
According to government sources Tuesday, the Ministry of Personnel Management will complete the first stage of its AI project "A-Cube (A3)," an automation system for the Central Disciplinary Committee, within this month and apply it to actual work starting in August. As a result, AI will automatically handle repetitive tasks such as preparing lists of supporting materials for disciplinary review, checking for missing documents and drafting resolutions. In particular, the time required to write and summarize meeting minutes is expected to be significantly reduced. Currently, an official takes several hours to listen to and record the meeting content and summarize it.
Yoo Seung-joo, the Personnel Ministry's planning and coordination officer who oversaw the A-Cube project, said, "Since review and deliberation work is commonly performed by most government ministries, it can be sufficiently expanded to other ministries." A-Cube (cube) carries the meaning of using AI to analyze (Analytics) work and connect it to execution (Action).
The system was developed directly by the ministry's IT officials, who have taken an interest in AI and steadily built up their capabilities, using the "Vibe Coding" method. Public-sector AI projects typically take two to three years just for planning, securing budgets and commissioning contracts, but by having frontline officials develop it directly, the development period was greatly shortened and the budget was reduced, sources said.
As the second stage of the A-Cube project, the Personnel Ministry has also begun developing a large language model (LLM) specialized in personnel administration. The aim is to build an AI model that best understands personnel work in order to rapidly develop various administrative services.
ChatGPT, a general-purpose AI, has not sufficiently learned administrative document formats, internal data and work procedures, and therefore has limitations for specialized personnel administration services. In contrast, the ministry expects that building its own AI model trained on the ministry's work data—including laws, manuals, complaint-handling cases and past review cases—will allow new administrative services to be developed far more efficiently.
To this end, the ministry has also built a collaboration system by designating employees with the technical foundation for AI transformation as Data Agents (DAs) in each department, connecting the technical departments with working-level departments. This reflects the difficulty of AI experts understanding administration and administrative experts understanding AI technology. Hong Won-ki, the Personnel Ministry's data information officer, said, "Only when domain experts and AI technology are combined can services that can actually be used in the field emerge."
Experts forecast that AI will change the way the government operates itself, beyond individual tasks. Kim Young-mi, a professor of public administration at Sangmyung University, said, "The government's current use of AI remains at the level of raising productivity, such as writing reports, responding to complaints and organizing meeting minutes, but this is only the beginning." She added, "In the future, it will shift from a 'government where civil servants use AI' to a 'government that operates together with AI.'" She stressed, "Connecting several carriages together does not make a train," adding, "Rather than attaching AI to existing work, we need the 'AI by Design' principle, which designs policies and administrative processes on the premise of using AI from the start."
