KITA holds AI seminar to help small exporters bridge technology gap

The Korea International Trade Association's FTA and Trade Comprehensive Support Center held an AI seminar on FTA and trade business support solutions Friday at Trade Tower in Samseong-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

The event was organized to help small and medium-sized enterprises — which have been slower to adopt AI than large conglomerates — close the technology gap amid rapidly growing demand for AI transformation in trade operations.

More than 200 trade practitioners from exporting companies attended the hands-on seminar, which covered AI applications immediately usable in trade work, including customs data verification, overseas buyer discovery and intellectual property searches.

The seminar comprised three expert sessions: AI agent-based automation for finding overseas buyers, HS code classification, country-of-origin determination and regulation searches, and intellectual property information searches along with useful prompting techniques.

Kim Deok-gyu, chief executive of Abrams Wiki Korea, which operates an AI-based trade platform, walked attendees through a buyer discovery process moving from keyword design and candidate company collection to information verification, customs data review and final selection of promising buyers.

"Even if a company appears as an importer in customs data, it is often a logistics agency or a simple intermediary," Kim said. "The key is to clearly embed in the prompt the criteria for identifying genuine end-buyers with a recurring import structure."

Seo Ga-hee, chief executive of Federation, then presented methods for applying generative AI to core FTA tasks — HS code classification by product, country-of-origin determination and overseas trade regulation searches. Song Hyo-gyeong, a team leader at WIPS, which operates an online patent search platform, explained how to use the Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service to conduct patent searches and prior-art investigations, and shared practical prompting tips for verifying research materials.

Choi Jeong-sik, head of KITA's FTA and Trade Comprehensive Support Center, said AI is "an important tool for boosting the trade productivity of small businesses that are short on staff and budgets." He added that the association would continue expanding practical AI education "so that our companies can automate routine tasks and focus their capabilities on core work such as building export strategies."

Meanwhile, KITA has been broadening its support for the startup generation through a range of initiatives, including the launch of the KITA Next-Generation Global CEO Program, designed to cultivate next-generation business leaders equipped to navigate the global trade environment.