MyICSA Analysis Engine — Papua New Guinea's AI-Powered Visa Processing System

Papua New Guinea's Immigration and Citizenship Services Authority (ICSA) worked with Amazon Web Services and local technology partner NiuPay to build the MyICSA Analysis Engine (MAE), a generative-AI system that reviews visa applications and supporting documents automatically. After a proof-of-concept in 2024, the system went live in 2025 and is now fully integrated into PNG's eVisa platform, handling short-term visa applications around the clock.

In its first three months of operation MAE processed more than 14,000 applications and analysed over 54,000 supporting documents, according to AWS's technical case study. The system cut typical short-term visa processing time from up to two weeks down to under four minutes, and now auto-processes about 95% of short-term applications without manual review — a shift AWS and ICSA describe as up to a 99% improvement in operational efficiency. Before deployment, the model was validated against 100,000 historical sample cases, and the build took roughly 10 months from project start to national go-live; the system is designed to handle up to 1,000 applications a day.

Independent PNG business and trade press have confirmed the system is now embedded in the country's eVisa workflow and describe it as one of the first uses of generative AI for a government workload in the Pacific Islands. That said, every hard metric in this record traces back to the vendor (AWS) or the implementing team; no independent government audit, third-party accuracy assessment, or published error/appeal rate was found. Cost and budget figures were not disclosed in any available source, and no data-protection or algorithmic-transparency documentation was located — points any adopting government should probe before replicating.

Read the full analysis: https://thepngbulletin.com/news/transforming-visa-services-through-technology/