Ten days, three Korean cities: after the tourists, Korea wants people to work with

Whenever I write about AI, Korea keeps coming up.

Korea has the second-largest number of paid ChatGPT subscribers in the world, after the United States. In June 2026, Anthropic opened a Seoul office alongside partnerships with NAVER, Samsung SDS and LG CNS. Venture investment in Korean startups hit a record 8.87 trillion won in the first half of 2026, more than half of it in AI.

Korea and Japan keep getting closer, too. From January to August 2026, 7.42 million people from Korea visited Japan, more than from any other country or region. Going the other way, Korea is the top overseas destination for Japanese travelers, at 28%. In a program helping Korean startups expand abroad, 163 of 621 applicants were aiming for Japan.

At DATA WORLD, Asia, Taiwan and Korea included, is one of the stories we follow most closely. And yet I had never been to Korea.

Then Duncan from Hoppers, which runs a digital nomad community in Korea, got in touch. There was a program, he said, that moves through Incheon, Busan and Jeju over 10 days and connects participants from around the world with local governments and companies. I said yes right before the deadline. A few days later, I was in Korea.

Those 10 days got partnerships with Korean companies moving. I worked by the sea, shared a table with someone new every night, and somewhere along the way the business conversations started moving. This article walks through the trip city by city, and checks what we heard on the road against Korea's official statistics.

Korea Nomad Gateway is organized by Incheon Metropolitan City, Busan Metropolitan City and Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, each working with its local Center for Creative Economy and Innovation, a regional startup hub. The 2026 edition ran from September 6 to 15, with three nights in each city. Its 20 participants came from the United States, Russia, Switzerland, Colombia, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere.

From Incheon International Airport we headed to Songdo, a new district built on reclaimed land and lined with high-rises. It was our base for the first three days.

That evening the orientation began at Incheon Global Campus, and Duncan opened with a promise.

I have a responsibility to bring you guys from the starting point to an end. No one left behind. Whatever it takes.

Dinner was samgyeopsal. The next day brought proper jajangmyeon in Incheon's Chinatown and a café meeting with the people who drive innovation policy in Incheon. Business talk on day two.

A company called "Demon Incheon"

On the evening of day two we visited Magye Incheon, a company that literally calls itself "Demon Incheon." Up the stairs of an old building in the old town is a room covered wall to wall in event posters, a base for creators and businesses working on the local area.

"Magye," or "demon world," started out as an online jab at Incheon. According to the local paper Kyeongin Ilbo, the nickname spread on internet forums from the early 2000s, while Incheon's actual crime rate ranked eighth of Korea's 17 provinces and metropolitan cities, right in the middle. Magye Incheon owns the insult on purpose, and runs privately led projects that renovate old buildings, team up with long-standing shops, hold festivals and host classes for young founders. They turned the slur into the town's sign, and I love that.

Nearby, we saw a building that had stood empty for 20 or 30 years, turned into a neighborhood café by a group of women. Dinner was at a roast-chicken place that hangs old photos and school yearbooks on its walls, so locals can come and share memories. Turning old things into reasons for people to gather: Incheon's old town is full of that.

Codex talk over tacos

Day three ended with tacos. Someone at our table mentioned, casually:

VOICE

I used to work in Codex, so like, you know, 5.5, 5.4.

He meant Codex, OpenAI's coding AI. Before I could ask more, the food arrived and that was the end of it. Frontier-AI talk popping up at an ordinary dinner table: that night showed me early on what makes this program fun.

Incheon in numbers: the one city of three that draws people in their 20s

Incheon is part of the capital region, along with Seoul and Gyeonggi. In the statistics, it was the only one of the three cities pulling young people in.

In 2025, 32,264 more people moved into Incheon from elsewhere in Korea than moved out, including a net 5,004 people in their 20s. Its population rose from about 2.93 million at the end of 2015 to about 3.05 million at the end of 2025. With Korea's main international airport and the high-rise skyline of Songdo, it's easy to see the appeal.

And of everyone who left Jeju in 2025, 2,187 moved to Incheon. The three cities on our route are linked by the flow of people, too.

At 9 a.m. on day four, everyone met in the lobby. We took the high-speed train from Gwangmyeong Station and reached Busan in the early afternoon. The jumble of buildings around the station looked a lot like a Japanese regional city, and the participants from abroad noticed it too.

Our workspace was Busan Workation Center, high above the sea and the port. Open a laptop at the window and the harbor is right in front of you. Honestly, I could work there every day.

The evening meetup brought together senior Busan officials, founders of startups recently launched in the city and nomad workers, all around a pile of pizza boxes. The next day, I pitched our business to a startup support program back in Japan, from Korea. Even on the road, the work keeps moving.

Lunch was Busan's signature milmyeon, cold noodles. Seoul has cold noodles too, but Busan's, we were told, are something else entirely.

Learning how to build an "agent" from an AI engineer

The afternoon of day five brought an AI workshop by Andy, an engineer in the group.

Andy has worked as an engineer for years and is now an AI engineer. He runs several companies, advises others, and also contributes code to Hermes, an open-source AI agent. Hermes, published by Nous Research in the US, learns how you work as reusable "skills," keeps memory across conversations, and can be called up from chat apps.

The theme was how to connect AI models to real work through "agents." Andy ran Hermes live and walked us through it step by step.

• Connect a model: choose which AI model serves as the brain and plug it into the agent
• Give it skills: turn tasks you do often into "skills" the AI can reuse
• Connect outside services: hook it up to the tools of everyday work, such as email, chat and databases
• Split the work: instead of one AI doing everything, divide tasks among several agents with different roles
• Set the bar: decide up front how you will judge whether the agent's work was good

In the Q&A, questions kept coming: how much should an AI remember, what does it cost, how do you keep it safe and protect privacy. The audience was engineers and founders working remotely around the world, so every question quickly turned into a conversation about how to bring this into their own work.

On day six we went out on a yacht off Gwangalli after work: a long suspension bridge, the high-rises along the shore, fireworks, then hot pot for our last night in Busan.

Busan in numbers: record tourists, so the next step is people who come to work

Busan is Korea's second-largest city. In 2025 it welcomed 3.64 million foreign visitors, an all-time high, more than 30% above the pre-pandemic 2019 figure of about 2.69 million.

Its population, meanwhile, fell from about 3.51 million at the end of 2015 to about 3.24 million at the end of 2025, and the city lost a net 4,510 people in their 20s in 2025. In 2024, Busan became the first of Korea's big metropolitan cities to enter the "extinction risk" stage on an index from the Korea Employment Information Service, a government research body, which compares the number of women aged 20–39 with the number of people aged 65 and over. Busan scored 0.49; anything below 0.5 counts as at risk.

Tourists come. What the city needs more of is young people who live and work there. So Busan is inviting people to come and work. Its "Busan-style workation" program, which brings company employees to work from the city for a while, drew about 3,300 participants in 2023 and about 6,900 in 2024, passing 10,194 in total. According to press reports, 10 of the participating companies have since moved to Busan or set up a branch or new company there. Some of the people who came to work ended up bringing whole companies. After working at that harbor-view desk, I get it.

On day seven we flew from Gimhae to Jeju. The first view of the island looked a lot like Okinawa.

What Duncan told us about the program's aim

After the afternoon orientation, Duncan walked us through the old downtown. Some shops still had their signs up with nothing inside. As we walked, I asked him straight out.

Connecting people from abroad with local companies and local government. Ten years ago, this place was packed with people. But young people have gone off to Seoul and elsewhere, and now there's nobody. Empty shops have multiplied, and Chinese tourists are what fills the gap.

Workations taking off is great, but on their own they're a temporary fix. What we really want is for startups from abroad to come and use this place as a base. For that, they first need connections with local companies and local government. So we bring founders into programs like this one, let them see what's good about the region, connect them with local businesses and officials, and hope it becomes their foothold in Korea.

I'd love it if some new kind of business value came out of this, on a global scale.

The next morning we talked with Robin, another organizer, who has spent about six years connecting Korean startups with people coming from abroad, handling everything from visas and housing to international students. This program was built not for sightseeing but for making connections.

That day began with yoga at Island Worklab Hamdeok, a coworking space right on the beach. Afterwards the other participants dragged me into the sea for a swim, and then showed me around the workspace.

In the afternoon, a bus tour of the island: a nature park and a clifftop viewpoint, then seafood for dinner. On the last day we interviewed a founder who has spent years helping Korean startups expand abroad, talked through a concrete project, and closed out the 10 days at a farewell dinner with everyone.

Jeju in numbers: the "Jeju life" boom, and where the young go

We checked what Duncan told us against the statistics. In 2025, Jeju lost a net 4,273 people to the rest of Korea. A survey of the old downtown strip from Jungang-ro to the Nammun rotary found 43 of 242 units, or 17.8%, empty.

In the 2010s, moving to Jeju was a national trend. In 2016 the island gained a net 14,632 people from the rest of Korea. Leaving the city to open a café on the island was a storyline in Korean dramas and books alike. Split those numbers by age, and something surprising appears.

Of the 62,859 people Jeju gained during the five boom years from 2014 to 2018, only 2,582, or 4%, were in their 20s. Jeju's migration boom was never a youth boom. And of the 9,321 people it lost from 2023 to 2025, 6,366, or 68%, were in their 20s.

The statistics also show where people go and why. Of the 32,609 people who moved from Jeju to other parts of Korea in 2025, 56%, or 18,275, went to the capital region. The most common reason for moving was work, at 35.5%. (These figures cover all ages; no breakdown for people in their 20s is published.)

Foreign visitors to Jeju, meanwhile, bounced back from 86,444 in pandemic-hit 2022 to 2,242,187 in 2025, a 26-fold rise. The tourists are back. For young people to stay, the island needs work. That is exactly why Jeju, after tourists, is now trying to attract people who come to work. What Duncan told us holds up in the numbers.

Back home, the 10 days felt like they had gone by in a flash. I had no idea my first trip to Korea would turn out this productive.

Looking back, everything we heard in the three cities pointed the same way. The tourists come. What's missing is young people who live and work there. So the regions want to bring in people who come to work. But can headcount close that gap?

Nomads and population in numbers: an order of magnitude apart

From January 2024 to May 2026, Korea issued 743 digital nomad visas nationwide. Busan and Jeju alone lose a net 6,708 people in their 20s in a single year. And of the 398 visa holders living in Korea in May 2026, 340, or 85%, lived in the capital region. Even the nomads were clustering around Seoul.

So the Ministry of Justice cut the income bar for applicants aged 18 to 34 who live outside the capital region or in a depopulating area, from twice the country's gross national income (GNI) per person to one times (52.41 million won, based on 2025 figures), and extended the maximum stay from two years to three.

Even so, headcount alone won't refill the population. That is why Korea's regions connect newcomers with local companies and government, hoping work and new businesses grow from there. Busan's "10,000 visitors, 10 companies moved in" is one result. Japan has a word for this: kankei jinko, or "related population," the people who stay involved with a region without living there. What Korea's regions are really collecting is not residents but connections.

Our case: partnerships that started in Incheon

We got one of those connections ourselves.

Incheon's officials were very keen on helping Korean companies expand into Japan, and asked whether DATA WORLD could introduce Korean companies looking to enter Japan to our Japanese readers. We are now working toward partnerships with Korean companies on content in Japanese.

One person, ten days, and business conversations already moving. Not one extra resident shows up in the population statistics, yet new lines of business are starting to form between Incheon and Tokyo. These 10 days showed me firsthand what kind of "connection" Korea's regions are after.

Busan lost a net 4,510 people in their 20s in the year it set a tourism record. The top reason people leave Jeju is work. Tourists bring buzz, but tourism alone doesn't create the jobs that make a 25-year-old want to build a career in town. That is why Korea's regions are now inviting people who come to work, and companies to build things with. The harbor-view desks in Busan and the empty shops in Jeju's old town are both waiting for them.

This program was a partnership of three local governments, with their Centers for Creative Economy and Innovation running things on the ground. Senior officials showed up to the meetup, and Incheon's officials proactively asked about introducing companies that want to expand into Japan. The national government lowered the visa bar for the regions. Government and the private sector are working together to connect newcomers with local companies. That closeness is a big opportunity for Japanese companies, and for media like us.

Korea sends more visitors to Japan than any other country, one in four Korean startups looking abroad is looking at Japan, and AI investment is at a record. Yet in Japan, you rarely hear about business in Korea's regions. Frontier AI comes up over dinner, and local officials ask about partnerships with Japan on their own initiative. Korea's regions turned out to be far closer, and far easier to get into, than I had imagined.