South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT held a workshop on April 27 to discuss an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem development strategy it plans to unveil in the first half of the year.

Agentic AI is AI that understands a user's complex commands on its own and performs tasks. While existing generative AI provided information, agentic AI is a concept that has evolved to a stage where it performs practical work.

The ministry launched a national "Agentic AI Alliance" on April 1. The workshop reviewed the direction for establishing a tentative "Agentic AI ecosystem development strategy" to be released in the first half of this year and discussed creating outcomes from the alliance's activities.

Participants included subgroup leaders NC AI, the LG AI Research Institute, Kakao and Soongsil University's AI Safety Research Center. Attendees also included the secretariat agencies the National Information Society Agency (NIA), the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), the Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP), the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) and the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI).

Lee Jin-soo (이진수), the ministry's director general for AI policy planning, said the ministry would actively communicate with the alliance to establish policies that reflect voices from the field. He added it would focus its policy capabilities on creating an agentic AI ecosystem that the public and companies can feel.