AI GovTech Wello Wins AAAI Innovative Application Award

AI GovTech startup Wello has received global recognition for its technology by winning this year's 'Innovative AI Applications Award' at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The corresponding research paper is scheduled to be published in AAAI's international academic journal 'AI Magazine' in September. This prestigious award is presented to research that has successfully applied AI technology to real-world services, achieving outstanding results. Wello's award-winning paper is titled 'Innovating Government Subsidy Programs through an RQ-VAE-based Generative Recommendation System,' and it centrally utilized RQ-VAE, an AI technique for precisely compressing and representing complex data. Wello's research team, in collaboration with Professor Jaehong Park and researcher Jiwon Kim from Kyung Hee University, developed an 'AI-based generative recommendation system' trained on clickstream data from approximately 185,000 users and 240,000 subsidy documents. This system aims to accurately predict and recommend government subsidy policies that users are likely to be interested in. As a result of commercializing this system on Wello's platform, it achieved remarkable performance, with a click-through rate increase of approximately 68% compared to existing recommendation systems. Furthermore, it demonstrated tangible social value by generating government budget savings of approximately $7.8 million (about 10 billion Korean Won). Yurianna Kim, CEO of Wello, emphasized that this award is highly significant as it recognizes the achievements of a model that effectively connects the government and its citizens, and stated that Wello will continue to advance its policy platform based on data and AI technology. Wello leads the GovTech market by operating various services, including its B2C business through the personalized policy recommendation platform 'Wello,' the B2B SaaS 'Wellobiz' for corporate government projects, and the B2G solution 'Wellolink' for government agencies' policy management.