AI 공부 동아리 만든 공무원들…“행정 효율 높입니다”

On September 30th at 6:30 PM, six civil servants gathered at the Jeonggeom Judicial Welfare Center's computing education room in Gimyo-ju, Gyeonggi-do. After work, they tiredly returned to their computers. While nodding along to the explanation by Yangju-si's freight team leader, they typed in a sentence on Google's Jamboard. Instantly, the screen displayed a cyan curved line graph and a circular pie chart, showing South Korea's economic growth rate for 2026.

The AI had created a unified dashboard using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The civil servants then learned how to upload the website via the 'drop' feature of the Netlify web publishing service. The resulting web page is accessible to others. This group of civil servants belongs to the 'SAPI' (Smart Administration & Policy Innovation) Research Club, an acronym for 'Smart Administration and Policy Innovation.'

They aim to reshape administration through wisdom. Former computer engineering student Yu led the group, teaching other departments how to apply AI. They also received the 'AI Champion Green' certification from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Korean Institute for the Intelligent Information Society in July. This certification recognizes practical skills in using AI and data for administration.

Yu leads the club, which has been active since January of the previous year, with 11 members from various departments. They create various resources, such as travel guides, presentation covers, and training programs for unmanned kiosks, during their voluntary study sessions. These skills have been applied to their respective jobs.

For example, Kim Se-hwa, head of the health promotion team at Namyangju's public health center, created a web page called 'Breath: Rest' that calculates the money saved by quitting smoking based on the amount smoked per day and the price of cigarettes. She also created a website showing the status of factories using 2,700 factory records.

Mr. Kim explained, "Although the workload is increasing, there are not enough personnel, so I wanted to learn how to use AI more efficiently. I used to have to find and reorganize data and calculate statistics every time I needed to report on the situation. Now, by compiling the Excel data and making a web page, I can quickly show the necessary information to those who need it."