[Reporter’s Notebook] Government in the AI Era: Still Sending People Off with 'Travel Bags'

"If we send people to Sejong City without fixing a system that has bureau and division directors, as well as working-level staff, rushing to Seoul whenever the National Assembly calls, all we will do is add 5,460 more 'commuting bureaucrats' who spend their time tapping away on laptops aboard the KTX." A section chief from Sejong City whom I met recently sighed as he said this. The government had just announced plans to relocate 31 central government agencies and an additional 5,460 civil servants to Sejong City.

Watching the announcement of this latest plan to relocate government agencies brought another scene to mind. Just days earlier, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety had promoted the expansion of "On AI," which can search the web and even draft official documents within the government's closed network. As the government says, AI is rapidly changing how work gets done. But the way civil servants work has changed little. Are we simply moving people and desks from one place to another?

Administrative inefficiency will not disappear if organizational culture remains unchanged. Even in an era when AI writes reports and documents are shared through the cloud, civil servants still board the KTX to travel between Seoul and Sejong. Whenever the National Assembly sets its schedule, working-level staff from Sejong spend the night on standby, shuttling between the corridors of lawmakers' offices in Yeouido and cafes near the National Assembly. This striking scene has remained unchanged for more than a decade. That is why self-deprecating expressions such as "road director" and "KakaoTalk manager" persist. At a recent public hearing, Park Jin, a professor at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management, criticized the practice, saying, "It is still common for working-level staff to remain on standby all night until they receive anticipated questions for parliamentary inquiries directed at the government."

To address this, the government must minimize in-person briefings and establish electronic documents and video conferences as standard means of making decisions. It must also build a digital collaboration system to reduce unnecessary trips to Seoul and repeated standby duty for working-level staff during the National Assembly response process. The roles of Seoul and Sejong should be divided rationally according to the nature of each ministry's work. If relocating people--a hardware move--is necessary, software innovation that changes how they work must come first.

A national administrative capital is not completed simply by moving government buildings. It has meaning only when people settle there, administration operates efficiently, and the public feels the difference. If the government still has civil servants pack their travel bags first in an era when AI helps them with their work, technological innovation will remain just a slogan. What the government must change first is not where people are, but how they work.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.