It had to come sooner rather than later. One day, most of management's responses will come from generative artificial intelligence. The Generalitat has taken the first step with a project with Google's Palm 2 language model for citizen queries. At the moment, in an initial phase limited to the Business Management Office. The AI's responses will be supervised by an official before being output.
“This is a small step, but a big step for Catalan,” says Sergi Marcén, Secretary of Telecommunications and Digital Transformation of the Generalitat of Catalonia. “It is a project that has a very important journey. In the end, he observes, the citizen's relationship with the administration will end up going through artificial intelligence and this has many points that must be taken into account and on which we have to work. The first is that the machine understands us. That we can relate to her.”
The initiative has had the active participation of Google Cloud, which had already trained its Palm 2 AI language model to understand and express itself in Catalan, and the technology and software and data management consultancy Capgemini, which presented the innovation project of experimentation.
Marc Realp, director of Innovation and Public Sector at Capgemini, points out that in this initial phase the aim is: “to first validate that the use of this generative AI engine that allows anticipating and automating responses is useful for the official who today prepares those responses. and that we really make it efficient and make your life easier.”
Javier Martínez, head of the pre-sales area at Google Cloud, assures that the experience with AI in the administration does not attempt to validate the language model, but rather “feed it with the Generalitat's own information that the model is capable of understanding and with which it builds.” the answers".
Regarding the need for an official to supervise the AI's responses to citizen queries, he indicates that "it is common for an emerging technology like this to have reinforcement and validation from humans." “As they evolve and build trust,” he adds, “in certain areas they may end up going alone and in others there may be a person behind them.” The intention of the Generalitat is that this entry of AI into citizen consultations is only a first step. At the moment, it is being tested with simple questions, one of the most common ones answered by the Business Management Office.
“We are lifting this system. Once we know that the system has learned, then it can work on its own,” says Marcén. From his point of view, “this brings a very important change to administration, because any task that is repetitive and specialized can be replaced by AI.” Consequently, he foresees changes in the role of public workers: “it means that we have to consider what the public administration of the future and the work of civil servants will be. Surely we will have to look for new or additional competencies in officials.”
Marcé believes that the use of AI will allow the Generalitat to anticipate the needs of citizens: “it is just one piece of everything we are building. “We are working on a data lake that allows us to be proactive when providing services.”
