GS holds 5th hackathon as chairman says AI is transforming workplace safety

GS Group held its 5th GS Group Hackathon on Monday at the Westin Seoul Parnas in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

The hackathon brings together GS employees to propose ideas using AI, from in-house productivity improvements to broader business innovations. A total of 923 people are expected to participate through Tuesday — 797 employees from GS affiliates and 126 external participants — making it the largest edition to date. Cumulative participation over the past five years has reached 2,732.

This year's theme is "Play with Gen AI Season 3: Build and Act," reflecting a dual focus on creating AI-powered outputs that actually work (Build) and connecting them to real workplaces and business operations (Act).

GS Group Chairman Heo Tae-soo, who attended the event, said ideas from employees who know the workplace best, combined with AI, had become a force for changing how industrial safety is managed. "I will actively support the challenges that began at the hackathon so they can take root beyond GS, reach more workplaces and lead to new value," he said.

GS Caltex Vice Chairman and CEO Heo Se-hong, who delivered the opening remarks, said the hackathon was a place to bring out and act on ideas that are rarely tried in everyday work. "I hope you spend the next two days asking questions freely, taking on challenges and discovering new possibilities," he said.

This year's participants are working with AI-ready data. Applying AI to industrial settings requires data to be organized in a format that AI can read — a step that must come first. Even when data has accumulated on-site, inconsistent formats and standards make retrieving and processing it time-consuming.

To ease this bottleneck, GS has been refining and structuring data gathered across various business sites, including power plants and convenience stores. Its innovation unit 52g, for example, has organized tacit knowledge from GS Donghae Power — covering operations, maintenance and facilities — into AI-readable form, and is developing a power-plant-specific AI model that understands on-site knowledge and work procedures.

At this hackathon, participants are combining AI-ready data with GS's AI transformation platform MISO to solve real workplace problems. The key is cutting the time spent on data preparation so ideas can be implemented faster and deployed on-site sooner.

Kim Jin-a, a GS executive director who helped organize the hackathon, said five years of the event had established GS's field-centered AI transformation as an innovation model that drives real change, beyond slogans or one-off experiments. "We plan to support this year's outputs through verification and refinement so they translate into tangible results in actual work and business performance," she said.

Meanwhile, the safety management AI agent team AIR (AI Risk Assessment) received the Open Innovation Award at the event. AIR originated from an idea proposed at the 3rd GS Group Hackathon by five employees from GS Power's safety and mechanical divisions. Users enter a task name and a brief description, and the AI automatically identifies potential hazards, assigns risk ratings and suggests preventive safety measures. Built by frontline workers rather than professional developers using MISO, it is now in use at more than 330 worksites, including small and midsize businesses.