Could Government Chatbots Be a Reality in Ottawa’s New AI Strategy?

OTTAWA—Delayed air passengers, disgruntled phone customers, and even hungry people craving a slice of pizza are increasingly finding their pleas to private companies being answered by artificial intelligence.

Soon, Canadians who need to reach out to the federal government could also find themselves talking to an employee who has been assisted by non-human AI.

Ottawa is developing a strategy to incorporate more AI in the federal public service. While it’s too early to determine the exact implementation, chatbots are a likely possibility.

Stephen Burt, the government’s chief data officer, mentioned that private-sector call centers are utilizing generative AI chatbots to navigate internal data and assist employees in providing better and quicker responses when customers call in.

He stated, “I can envision several similar applications within the Canadian government, especially for services like EI, Old Age Security, and immigration processes.”

Civil servants could use AI to sift through large amounts of government data. Within the Treasury Board of Canada, employees handle government finances, hiring, and technology used by the public service.

“There’s a lot of documents with a lot of words on a lot of pages of paper. It’s difficult even for folks inside government to understand in any given situation what is most applicable,” Burt explained.

The federal government will construct the AI strategy in the upcoming months, aiming to launch it next March. The plan is to encourage departments to openly experiment to learn what works best.

Burt noted, “We can’t do everything at once, and it’s not yet clear what the best-use cases will be.”

Regarding restrictions, it’s premature to discuss any red lines, although there will undoubtedly be areas where caution is necessary.

Generative AI applications are capable of generating text and images from vast amounts of input data.

The federal public service has already begun testing AI. Joanna Redden, an associate professor at Western University, has compiled a database detailing numerous government uses of AI in Canada.

The applications range from predicting tax case outcomes, sorting temporary visa applications, monitoring invasive plants, to identifying whales from aerial images.

In the European Union, certain uses of AI are prohibited, such as untargeted image scraping for facial recognition, emotion detection systems in workplaces/schools, social scoring, and some predictive policing methods.

At an event introducing the strategy in May, Treasury Board President Anita Anand mentioned that generative AI would not generally be used for confidential matters available only to cabinet ministers behind closed doors.

According to University of Ottawa law professor Teresa Scassa, the government’s privacy legislation needs updating for the information society and AI context.

There could be concerns about personal data ingestion with generative AI and how this information is managed.

Scassa also raised questions about recourse if a government chatbot provides incorrect information to someone.