From hospitals to city halls to classrooms, artificial intelligence is being deployed in mission-critical institutions.
The City of Mission, Fraser Health, Mission RCMP, and Mission Public School District are all using AI in different ways.
Mission RCMP and Mission Memorial Hospital are both piloting AI projects, allowing city and school district employees to use the generated AI for a variety of tasks, as long as it is approved for use.
At the district level, MPSD Superintendent Angus Wilson said learning and teaching have also been affected. Preparing students for the workforce also means making them aware of the potential impact of AI on specific careers.
“You can’t just ignore what’s going on and say it doesn’t exist,” Wilson said.
Kevin Layton-Brown, a UBC computer science professor and Canadian Institute for Advanced Study AI chair, said the mission’s institutions collectively are doing “a lot of good things” to move into the modern era.
“Asking about the use of AI is like asking about the use of computers: It depends on how you use it and what you use it for,” says Leighton Brown.
Leighton-Brown said the tools have been improved specifically for research. He said that making AI usage public is a good idea, but wonders how meaningful it is if it’s used too often.
“If they use it all the time, you might get a boilerplate for everything they do… It might be something like, ‘This bag of chips was made in a facility that processes nuts.’ You just understand absolutely everything and it doesn’t actually tell you anything,” he said.
While no system is perfect, Leighton-Brown said not using one can also lead to mistakes.
“In particular, I think we need to be concerned that these mistakes don’t necessarily happen uniformly and randomly. They especially tend to happen in situations that are underrepresented in the training data. So whatever you see often is going to do better than something you don’t see very often,” he said.
discharge plan, patient Mission summary memorial hospital
Fraser Health said it is in the early stages of leveraging AI within its organization.
Dimple Prakash, interim executive director of Fraser Health’s Center for Advanced Analytics, Data Science and Innovation (CAADSI), said in a statement that AI can help streamline operations and reduce administrative tasks.
“Across every sector and industry, organizations are investing in AI solutions as a key catalyst for change, including here at Fraser Health,” said Prakash.
Prakash said the AI project is designed to support care workers, not replace them.
“Clinical decisions remain the responsibility of trained professionals who are accountable to regulations and standards of professional practice. These tools provide timely data and insights that support, not replace, human judgment in the delivery of care,” she said.
Dr. Paul Theron, site director at Mission Memorial Hospital, said in an interview that an AI pilot project has been in use at the hospital since 2025.
“As it is a small site, it is often easier to try some initial projects here and see if they can be scaled to larger sites,” he said.
According to Fraser Health, Mission Memorial Hospital is currently using an “AI-enabled solution” for predictive discharge planning and admission summaries, which automatically creates a comprehensive description of a patient’s length of stay and includes it in the discharge summary for review by clinicians.
Other “AI solutions” Fraser Health is in the early stages of include early warning systems that provide data to help identify patients at risk of worsening conditions such as urinary tract infections, delirium, pneumonia and sepsis.
“These systems will help medical teams intervene earlier when a patient is at risk of deterioration and improve treatment outcomes,” Fraser Health said.
Another initiative is an AI-powered scheduling tool that predicts demand waves in emergency and medical departments through analysis of patient data.
“These tools help leaders proactively plan staffing by generating baseline schedules and multiple scenarios based on projected patient volumes and staffing guidelines,” they said.
Prakash said AI allows healthcare providers to spend more time with patients and focus on providing quality care.
He added that all AI initiatives at Fraser Health are evaluated in collaboration with clinical, physician, and operational leaders to identify needs and gaps.
“They are trialled and piloted before implementation, and once deployed, they are subject to continuous monitoring and evaluation to ensure they deliver the intended clinical and operational value and return on investment. Solutions are refined, pivoted, or discontinued if they do not benefit healthcare providers or patients as expected,” Prakash said.
Worn camera data transcription tool
Mission RCMP detachments also participate in AI pilots.
In November 2024, the detachment became the first in the state to begin using body-worn cameras.
A new pilot project is evaluating the use of AI-based transcription tools within the body-worn camera program, according to a statement from the E Department.
“All AI-generated video transcripts remain subject to human review and correction, and as the project is still in its early stages, we are still evaluating its feasibility, accuracy, and potential privacy implications before sharing further details,” E-Division said.
Police detachment Chief Ted Luko said earlier this year that Mission RCMP has integrated artificial intelligence software that saves officers time writing reports by using audio and video from body-worn cameras and information from dispatch systems.
“This allows our officers to get back on the scene faster and respond to calls for service more quickly,” Luko said.
Convert technical content into plain language
City of Mission staff are currently using GovAI tools to help write, brainstorm, and draft content. According to the city’s announcement, officials used this to correct technical content into plain language.
The city was introduced to the GovAI platform at the 2024 MISA Canada Executive Summit. According to the statement, citizen data protection is a top priority and the platform will enable employees to utilize AI without the risk of sending sensitive data into the public domain.
“GovAI is a pioneering vendor solution designed to protect citizen data. It utilizes ‘shielding’ technology to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII) and protected personal information (PPI) before it enters large-scale language models (LLMs), preventing that data from being used for prompts or machine learning,” the city said.
Mission’s Workplace Artificial Intelligence Policy recognizes AI as a tool to drive innovation and progress, enhance workflows, streamline operations, and improve the customer experience.
However, we also noted the potential legal, business, and reputational risks associated with the use of AI.
This policy provides guidelines for City employees regarding confidentiality, data security, accuracy, and transparency. We ask our employees to be aware of hidden discrimination embedded in the AI data they generate and to label AI-generated content.
Changing the way teachers teach students
Superintendent Wilson said the district’s use of AI is evolving and ongoing. He said it’s impacting education in the same way calculators have.
“The reality is that right now AI is not incredibly great for doing anything too intellectually deep in academia. And I think a lot of the research that we’re doing with AI is on the operational side of things. And yet, I want to emphasize that AI is underutilized,” Wilson said.
Students and faculty need to be aware of AI when using it. He said some teachers are using it to create lesson plans, but the work required to ensure curriculum delivery is often more than without AI.
“You have to vet the content to make sure it meets the curriculum requirements, and thus is appropriate for the age level, and that’s often more work than just creating a lesson plan yourself,” Wilson says.
AI has also changed the way teachers teach students and handle assignments. With limited access to phones (and AI) during class, students must learn skills like writing in the classroom rather than at home.
“If students rely too much on AI, like they would on a calculator, it will cause problems later on,” he said.
Chat GPT and Microsoft Copilot are used “fairly regularly” at the district level to support policy efforts, but AI content makes up a small percentage of the final product.
“We’ve been in a very heavy policy development phase over the last year, so it’s actually being leveraged quite a bit. I would say that almost every policy that we’ve considered in the last year has considered leveraging AI,” Wilson said.
When undertaking policy work before AI is deployed, district officials research similar policies in other districts and consider aspects that might work or could be adjusted to align with the mission.
“That’s the same thing we’re asking things like Copilot to generate policies, so that we can compare them to our policies and other policies that already exist…AI-generated policies are often very long and actually need to be truncated. They can be very verbose, and that doesn’t necessarily help us, but it still gives us an additional perspective and maybe we can glean an idea or two from it.” Wilson said.
Wilson does not expect the use of AI at the district level to lead to staff reductions.
“That doesn’t seem realistic. In fact, I think it’s actually dangerous because AI is so devoid of common sense and human insight,” he said.
Ethical concerns also arise when misappropriating information without permission, particularly regarding indigenous cultural information.
“Essentially, by not giving credit and providing the required information you are stealing from everyone, and that should be even more of a consideration in our efforts, especially with Indigenous communities,” Wilson said.
Greater Vancouver is a ‘hotbed’ of AI expertise
Leighton-Brown said what’s happening in Mission is probably representative of the broader Lower Mainland. He said the Greater Vancouver region is an incredible hotbed of global AI expertise.
He said AI systems are less like humans and more like the evolution of Google.
“The main misconception is that people are just anthropomorphizing AI. They think that AI agents go out and act with beliefs and desires and are human-like. Anything that uses language starts to feel human-like to us,” he says.
Leighton-Brown later added: “It doesn’t help that the big AI companies have huge valuations on the stock market either, and they’re more interested in selling the narrative that they’re going to absolutely change everything, because that’s the only way they can justify their valuations. So I think there’s too much hype in this industry, and I think it should be taken with a grain of salt, at least for now.”
