The Ontario government is stepping into the rapidly growing world of artificial intelligence, giving civil servants more advanced tools by telling them they can use Microsoft Copilot in their daily work.
The move appears to have caught on, with internal metrics showing Ontario Public Service has the highest rate of co-pilot chat usage in the country.
More than 15,000 civil servants use the artificial intelligence assistant every week, and the “Copilot Chat InsideOPS” page receives more than 120,000 page views, according to a government presentation obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
The government says it is the most commonly used drug in Canada.
Although government employees are mostly prohibited from using other chatbots such as Google Gemini and ChatGPT due to security concerns regarding public data and sensitive information, they are encouraged to find ways to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into their roles.
Stephen Crawford, Ontario’s Minister of Public, Business Delivery and Procurement, who is in charge of the program, said there are early signs that the new system is working.
He said that in addition to the government-wide Copilot, leaders and pioneers in artificial intelligence have been selected to take on more complex tasks and integrations.
“We have begun rolling out a more advanced program to several hundred people and are currently evaluating it,” he told Global News. “My understanding is that at current levels, the average civil servant is saving almost three hours a week.”
The government is currently in the first phase of introducing artificial intelligence, aiming to “establish an AI foundation” and identify “use cases,” according to documents seen by Global News.
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Once the pilot phase is over, the company will work on developing specialized artificial intelligence, which it hopes will improve productivity by 20 percent, according to one document.
The third phase, dubbed “Industrialization of AI,” will see governments apply artificial intelligence “at scale.”
Crawford said widespread adoption of artificial intelligence across government would not necessarily mean job losses for civil servants, but argued it would give people time back.
“There will be a transformation of work and people will move into more productive roles,” he says.
“No, we won’t see job losses. We’ll see job gains and productivity gains. Businesses, organizations and governments will reinvest to get even more productivity gains.”
The current example is relatively simple, although the long-term effects can be significant.
Some great use cases for artificial intelligence mentioned in government documents include media monitoring and drafting news releases.
Cam Vidler, co-founder of artificial intelligence company Authentica and former chief of staff to the finance minister, said the potential of agent-based artificial intelligence allows governments to think more broadly.
Agentica AI is a developing field where AI agents can be programmed with a set of criteria to perform specific tasks, combining the decision-making capabilities of AI with strict rules to avoid the hallucinations found in widespread chatbots.
“On the back end of government, we’re talking about automating the tasks involved in government operations, such as procurement and procurement and government-mandated payments,” he said. “There are many efficient ways.”
Vidler said training agents to handle work with ServiceOntario and managing questions through programs such as government rebates could potentially save man-hours and provide the public with faster answers.
Last year, for example, the government provided $200 rebate checks to people in the state ahead of early elections.
In some cases, the program ran into problems with outdated addresses or delays in checks sent to deceased people. These problems typically cannot be solved with existing IT systems, and Vidler suggested that AI could be used in the future.
“Exceptions come straight to someone’s inbox, so someone has to deal with them,” he said. “When you think about how many call center agents you would need to deploy to deploy a program like that, the main factor is that there’s just one thing you can’t reliably automate.”
Copilot is the only artificial intelligence approved by most civil servants, so the government is likely far from that situation yet.
“It’s hard to say exactly” when the company will increase its use of artificial intelligence, Crawford said.
“But if I had to guess, I’d say within a few years,” he said.
Vidler said it’s important to choose a few situations in which to use the system, rather than coming up with an entire comprehensive strategy for the ever-evolving technology.
“You don’t have to make a decision to deploy AI for everything, right? Or come up with a big AI policy that takes all the different circumstances into account,” he said.
“Choose two low-hanging fruit examples and define processes that you know can be automated more efficiently, processes that you know are currently error-prone, and processes that you don’t want your employees to spend time on.”
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