Finance Ministry holds first AI hackathon among government ministries, selects 4 projects

South Korea's Ministry of Economy and Finance has become the first government ministry to hold a generative AI hackathon for administrative innovation. Top projects will be incorporated into the ministry's integrated AI platform, AI-ONE, following a pilot service in October.

The ministry hosted the "Generative AI Service Discovery Hackathon" at the Narakium Taean Training Center from June 10 to 12, over two nights and three days.

The competition was designed to integrate generative AI technology into the ministry's core administrative functions — including economic policy, taxation, state property management, international finance and public institution oversight — with the aim of making work processes more intelligent and developing services that citizens can directly experience.

A total of 25 innovation projects were submitted from across the ministry's divisions and bureaus, with 15 advancing to the finals after a preliminary screening. Participants received mentoring from the ministry's AI advisory panel and private-sector experts, and developed working prototypes ready for immediate use.

Judges selected four projects as top entries for their potential to reduce the administrative burden on staff and improve overall efficiency.

One of the top-ranked projects, an automated card-news generation service, uses AI to analyze press releases drafted by each department and automatically produce them in card-news format. The service is expected to significantly cut production time for staff without requiring any additional budget.

A second project, an AI tool for streamlining state property management, automatically analyzes large volumes of state property data and policy criteria to support policy development. A third, an automated routine audit review drafting service, learns from existing review materials to generate draft audit opinions and is expected to speed up administrative processing.

The fourth top entry, ALIO AI Plus, is an AI service that provides integrated search across public institution management disclosures, facility information and various documents, with a focus on improving the convenience of information retrieval for users.

Other projects proposed at the hackathon included a job-matching AI tailored to job seekers using public institution recruitment data, an AI agent for interpreting national contract law, an AI assistant for tax law revisions, an internal work-support chatbot, and an AI-based draft generator for National Assembly responses.

The ministry plans to refine the top ideas and prototypes and incorporate them into the AI-ONE platform on a rolling basis, rather than treating the hackathon as a one-off event. Since last year, the ministry has been pursuing an AI transformation across its administration, advancing initiatives such as cloud-based document management and a data learning and processing platform.

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol said the competition was "a meaningful first step in which ministry employees learned about AI technology and directly developed and applied it to administrative services," adding that the ministry would "lead the way in AI transformation to improve administrative efficiency and deliver innovative public services that citizens can truly feel."