AI that only gave answers when people asked began handling work directly in two places this week. The Ministry of Science and ICT has launched the 'AI-NEXT' project, which builds the ministry's entire work environment around agentic AI, and Shinhan Card joined hands with Mastercard to complete the first real 'AI Agent Pay' transaction by a domestic card company. Agentic AI refers to software that draws up a plan to reach a goal on its own and carries it out once the user sets only the goal. As execution authority has been handed over, rules setting out who takes responsibility when something goes wrong have become necessary alongside it, and that part remains at the stage where people point out that legislative preparation is needed.
Looking at the tasks the Ministry of Science and ICT plans to attach agents to within this year, the list includes support for radio station license reviews, support for electromagnetic wave certification reviews, budget document analysis, classification of National Assembly document requests and drafting of responses, and summarizing and analyzing press clippings. It stands out that tasks whose results directly affect people outside the ministry, such as reviews and National Assembly responses, are on the list.
A budget of 3.17 billion won has been allocated for this year. The ministry plans to draw up an advancement budget for 2027 and beyond after reviewing the results of the pilot operation, and has set a schedule to upgrade AI-based document centralization infrastructure in 2027 and complete the system by 2028. It amounts to a three-year roadmap, and this year's five tasks are its first test.
More than one ministry is moving. The Ministry of Finance and Economy is also preparing work to gather internal documents in one place and attach agents to each task through its 'AI-ONE Platform Construction Project'. Both projects have set linkage with the 'government-wide AI common foundation' as a condition. This common foundation is being pursued jointly by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, and it has central and local governments share private-sector AI models, training data and GPUs, on the premise of using the public-private cloud at the National Information Resources Service's Daegu center.
The obstacle to public-sector adoption is security. The government's internal network is cut off from the outside internet, so it is difficult to attach commercial AI services as they are, and an agent that handles documents can itself become a channel through which internal information leaks. The government is preparing both a plan to run AI in a network-separated environment and data loss prevention (DLP) measures.
In the private sector, payments opened first. AI Agent Pay works by having an agent find products, compare them and complete the payment, and the user approves only once and does not touch the rest of the process. Shinhan Card is the first domestic card company to produce a real transaction. KB Kookmin Card is expanding its corporate data business by adding an agent to its marketing solution for small business owners.
Moves to create standards have followed. The Linux Foundation officially launched the 'x402 Foundation' on the 2nd of this month. x402 is an agent payment protocol created by Coinbase, in which a server responds with a price when an AI accesses a service, and if that amount is within a budget set in advance, payment is made automatically in stablecoins. Google, Microsoft, Mastercard and Visa put their names on the launch, and Kakao Pay was the only domestic company to join as a founding member.
The disappearance of the method in which a person pressed a confirmation button for each payment means that the point at which a wrongly purchased item or a wrongly approved amount could be reversed disappears with it. The situation on the administrative side is similar. Government guidelines do not say who will later review the conclusions produced by a review support agent, or through what procedure. Discussion of the need to revise the AI Framework Act started from this gap.
The factor pressing for institutional arrangements is the adoption schedule itself. The Ministry of Science and ICT said it would attach agents to five tasks within this year, and the card company's real transaction was completed in the meantime. It means execution continues even while the rules are being worked out.
The point where technology changes a person's day is not the flashy side. It comes quietly, in the way that weeks of waiting after filing a permit application are shortened, and the 30 minutes spent comparing prices while shopping disappears. In return for getting that time back, what we hand over is each and every confirmation step. That is why the work of drawing the line between what to entrust and what to keep in hand has to begin within this year.
