Bank of Korea's AI 'BOKI' Boosts Work Efficiency, Earns Employee Praise

The Bank of Korea's (BOK) internally developed AI, 'BOKI,' is receiving high praise from employees for enhancing work efficiency. BOKI assists with various tasks, including internal data analysis, translation, and predicting press release titles.

Following the establishment of its Digital Innovation Division in 2020, the BOK has continued its AI technology research. With the emergence of private AI services like ChatGPT, the bank accelerated efforts to build its own AI that can safely utilize internal data, making it a core objective. The decision to build an in-house AI was driven by the difficulty of inputting internal documents into external AI systems, especially given the sensitive nature of information exchanged in financial market analysis.

Against this backdrop, BOKI, described as the 'world's first central bank sovereign AI' built by the Bank of Korea based on its own data and a closed network, has garnered attention from overseas central banks. Inquiries regarding BOKI's development experience and operational know-how are continuously being received, particularly from central banks in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Integrated with the Bank of Korea's internal data platform 'BIDAS,' BOKI can swiftly retrieve necessary information from approximately 19 million data sets. It has improved work efficiency by enabling unified searches of internal and external data that were previously isolated in a segregated network environment. Beyond data analysis and search, BOKI offers functions for internal regulation searches, document translation, and research material retrieval.

The system shows high satisfaction, notably reducing the time for translating external publications from about two days to just four hours. Its 'AI Press Officer' function helps organize predicted article titles and structures. Approximately 1.4 million internal documents were processed for AI training, with significant time spent on personal information removal and sensitive data classification.

To comply with National Intelligence Service security guidelines and ensure the safe use of internal data, BOKI was built on cloud infrastructure and a large language model (LLM) through public-private cooperation with Naver. Private AI services sometimes cite Wikipedia as a source or provide answers unrelated to the user's intent in research tasks, indicating a need for improvement. The ability to analyze complex tables remains a challenge.

The Bank of Korea is currently pilot-testing BOKI 2.0, focusing on integrating functions and improving response mechanisms. The 2.0 version allows all tasks to be performed on a single screen without navigating between function-specific menus and is designed to provide much more natural conversations, even for non-work-related queries, compared to the 1.0 version which often refused to answer irrelevant questions. BOKI 2.0 requires additional security approval from the National Intelligence Service, with the improved version scheduled for official release in July, following the incorporation of enhancements in June. Bank of Korea Governor Rhee Chang-yong and Naver Chairman and Founder Lee Hae-jin attended the '2026 Bank of Korea-Naver Joint AX Conference' to learn about AI technology trends.