The Seoul Metropolitan Government has allocated about 1.8 billion won to build AI agents that will handle administrative work in place of staff. The period is five months from the contract date. The project lays down a common operating foundation, builds three types of agents specialized for particular tasks on a pilot basis, and brings in the AI infrastructure to run them. The tasks chosen for the pilot are document summarization, meeting room reservations, and the selection of proposal evaluation committee members.
All three are tedious when done by people, and troublesome when done wrong. A mix-up in a meeting room reservation can be laughed off, but selecting proposal evaluation committee members is a different matter. Once software begins narrowing down a procedure on which the fairness of an evaluation rests, the question of who checks and signs off on that choice moves to the center of the work.
This project is a follow-up to the generative AI-based 'Chatbot 2.0,' whose construction was completed last May.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government will create an integrated operating system linked through MCP (Model Context Protocol) and connect agents to internal administrative systems such as the work management system, the meeting room reservation system, and the mail system. MCP refers to an agreement that lets AI call up the functions and data of outside systems in a set format.
The list of functions for the general-purpose agent being built alongside includes OCR-based document recognition, organizational chart lookups, budget and expenditure lookups, and mail sending. User permission verification is also included. The task specifications state that the agent itself checks whether a given person is qualified to view a given piece of information.
The financial sector moved in the same week. NH NongHyup Bank held a workshop with AgileSoDA at the NH Human Resources Development Center in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, on July 9, and announced on the 10th that it would begin identifying agent-based innovation projects and cooperating on AI transformation in earnest. Kang Tae-young, president of NongHyup Bank, attended the workshop, which was arranged following the acquisition of AgileSoDA.
The security firm Sysdig released an analysis on the 6th (local time) of an AI-based automated ransomware attack it named 'JadePuffer.' The method dug into misconfigured cloud IAM settings and externally exposed API keys to steal internal credentials. IAM refers to the access permission management system that determines what a given account is allowed to do.
The report stated that everything from reconnaissance to privilege theft and lateral movement followed in just a few minutes without real-time human intervention, and that more than 1,300 workloads fell within the affected range. It should be read with the caveat that it is a threat scenario analysis based on an actual operating environment.
The background to SK Telecom's push for an integrated identity management system that rebuilds company-wide security standards around identity connects here as well. In the days when only people logged in, protecting accounts and passwords was enough. Once agents enter systems directly and start working, the very types of entities seeking access multiply. SKT, a board member of the FIDO Alliance, has adopted the next-generation authentication solution 'Passkey,' and the solution received a GS certification grade 1.
Passkeys do not pass passwords back and forth. A private key is kept in the device's secure area and only the matching public key remains on the server, and at login only a signature value is exchanged. The design holds that with no password on the server to steal, there is nothing to be taken. How to extend this method, applied to people, to software actors remains the next task.
Agent-related announcements in administration, finance, security, public infrastructure, and agriculture came out in a cluster between July 9 and 12. The National Information Society Agency's plan to invest 11 billion won in building the foundations of an 'agent economy' sits in the same current. It is hard to see the institutions as having coordinated their schedules. It is more natural to see them as having reached the same conclusion in their own fields.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government has designated document summarization, meeting room reservations, and the selection of proposal evaluation committee members as its pilot targets. The work of checking and taking responsibility for the summaries and lists the agents produce remains with the officials in charge. The results of applying the three pilot agents to actual work can be seen five months from the contract date.
