Will the AI chatbot wave come for the federal government?

Delayed air passengers, disgruntled phone customers and even hungry people craving a slice of pizza increasingly find 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's been helped by non-human assistants.

Ottawa is working on a strategy to use more AI in the federal public service, and while it's too soon to say exactly what that could look like, chatbots are one likely possibility.

Stephen Burt, the government's chief data officer, said private-sector call centres are using generative AI chatbots to navigate internal data and help employees find better answers faster when customers call in.

«I can imagine a number of similar applications in the Canadian government context for services we offer to clients, from EI and Old Age Security through to immigration processes,» he said in an interview.

Civil servants could also use AI to sort through massive piles of government data, he said. In the Treasury Board of Canada alone, employees are responsible for 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 said.

The federal government will be crafting the AI strategy over the coming months, with the goal of launching it next March. The plan is to encourage departments to experiment openly, so that «they can see what's working and what's not.»

«We can't do everything at once, and it's not clear to me yet what are going to be the [best-use] cases,» Burt said.

When it comes to what won't