Korea District Heating CEO vows to expand staff AI skills after in-house app success

Korea District Heating President Ha Dong-geun said the app was "the result of recruiting in-house AI Pioneers and providing training in AI use and development," adding that the company would "continue working to improve employees' AI capabilities so that anyone can directly solve problems in their own work."

Korea District Heating has been building AI skills among its workforce to let staff resolve on-site problems on their own.

A non-developer field worker at the Yangsan branch used AI to develop a mobile app called Dduk DOC!, which generates field documents for equipment maintenance, and deployed it in daily operations.

Workers in the field need only enter a photo and brief notes on their phone, and the app automatically formats the information into an A4 document and saves it to a storage folder.

Document preparation time has been cut by about 83 percent, from 30 minutes to five. Previously, workers had to return to the office after completing maintenance, transfer photos to a computer and manually edit the form. All saved documents are stored as searchable data accessible at any time.