Korea Post Office improved work efficiency with an artificial intelligence (AI) agent developed directly by its staff. It applied the AI agent to document screening for a contest, a task previously handled by people, sharply cutting the time required.

Korea Post Office said on May 29 it used an AI judging agent in the first-round document screening process for the 2026 AI Innovation Idea Contest and selected works that passed.

The AI Innovation Idea Contest aims to strengthen employees' capabilities in using AI and to identify ideas and development cases to improve work efficiency. Until now, multiple judges reviewed each submission one by one, requiring significant time and manpower. There was also a limitation in that results could vary depending on a judge's subjectivity and fatigue.

An AI agent planned and implemented in-house by Seung-hoon Jeon (전승훈), digital innovation officer at Korea Post Office, assigns quantitative scores to works according to criteria and shares the reasons for scoring. Korea Post Office also carried out checks for hacking attempts aimed at AI vulnerabilities.

Using the AI judging agent, the first-round screening period, which took an average of about 2 weeks for 100 submissions, was sharply reduced to about 2 hours. Works that passed the first-round document screening this time included 16 idea-track entries such as AI automatic mail acceptance and real-time blocking of voice phishing and smishing impersonating post office brands, and 19 development-track entries such as AI-based delivery route optimisation and an AI work manual guide.

Korea Post Office plans to apply a judging approach in the second round in which people and AI collaborate, through employee voting, presentation-based judging for internal and external judges, and AI code reviews.

Korea Post Office head In-hwan Park (박인환) said, "The fact that the headquarters is judging employees' ideas with a system developed in-house by public officials itself is an example that directly shows the purpose of the AI contest to the entire organisation." He added, "We will continue to support voluntary innovation by internal public officials and work to change the way we work."