AI in the public sector

AI is a hype and governments consider it too, as a possible solution for whatever problems they face. To cut through the promo talk and put public services with their feet on the ground again, colleague Katy and I gave a series of well-attended, bilingual, presentations for Belgian public service personnel. What is true and false about AI, and what can you do with it in an (administrative) government context? The slides are available for download.

Next to a short overview of the various flavours of AI, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, we also pay attention to the practical side of things: how about data collection and the law, what are the technical requirements, how to organize updating and maintenance of an AI system, and which ethical issues need to be taken into account? We illustrate it with a few small examples that were built within Smals.

This presentation was repeated several times for a varied audience. AI for government will certainly remain a core topic for me in the near future. If you’d like to exchange some ideas, or have some interesting proposals for the application of AI in public services, feel free to contact me!