The federal government is asking public servants for ideas on how best to use artificial intelligence at work .
Statistics Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada have partnered with specialist publishing house Global Government Forum on a project dubbed the “Public Service Data/AI Challenge.”
The challenge , which opened for submissions at the end of May, comes as the federal government is about to release its highly anticipated and long-delayed national AI strategy.
AI use across the federal public service, which is a central part of the government’s plans to maintain productivity while shedding thousands of jobs, is guided by a separate federal strategy released last year.
As the technology is increasingly baked into daily office work, the Global Government Forum is canvassing rank-and-file public servants for ideas on how to improve how AI is applied to public services.
“We want to support the career development of participating public servants, helping you develop your skills, experience, and contacts across government,” the website reads.
The website does not mention financial compensation, though it does state that employers are expected to allow staff to participate during work hours.
Submissions do not need to be well-developed, according to the website. Instead, the most promising ideas will be developed with a team and eventually pitched to judges. The winning idea will be supported toward implementation.
The challenge has been running in the United Kingdom since 2022. Canada’s version is currently open for submissions, and applications close on June 30.
AI use expands across public sector
The federal government’s public AI register, part of a federal AI strategy meant to guide the uptake of the rapidly developing technology, currently lists about 400 current or planned AI systems across 42 government institutions.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and AI Minister Evan Solomon have repeatedly committed to expanding the use of AI across the public service.
The first federal budget under Carney pointed to the “integration of technology and artificial intelligence” as a key strategy for boosting productivity and improving services.
But that integration has already drawn concerns around specific uses, such as the government’s AI-powered translation tool GCTranslate, which has some translators concerned about linguistic rights, bias and the loss of nuance in translated texts.
When the federal strategy dropped last year, Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, called AI a “Trojan horse” for widespread public-service cuts.
At the time, Prier said any pursuit of AI to replace, rather than supplement, the work of public servants was a fool’s errand that could lead to arbitrary cuts.
The government’s long-awaited national AI strategy is set to land sometime this week.
A draft version of the strategy leaked to CBC laid out several goals related to the technology, including creating thousands of AI-related jobs and helping small- and medium-sized businesses access public computing infrastructure.
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