AI & Government: Value creation, care, innovation and being human
Challenger Seminar Series
On the 10th October 2024, IPAA Queensland was delighted to host their second Challenger Seminar Series for the year. 
At this event, Nathan Bines, the Executive Director, Data and AI, Queensland Government Customer and Digital Group shared the latest of the Queensland Government’s generative AI tool, QChat, and shared the latest in what the Queensland Government is doing to keep pace with this important area of digital transformation.
Following the scene setting, Fahim Khondaker, Partner, Data and AI at BDO, and Dr Katie Williams, University of Queensland School of Business, took to the stage with Nathan Bines to share their insights on the challenges and opportunities of AI, and presented some findings of their work with governments and public sectors. This conversation was moderated by Professor Tim Kastelle, Director of the Andrew N. Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership at UQ.
As many of us know, AI can present many benefits to government and users of their services. AI can be used to manage resources, improve efficiencies, and enhance public services. The use of AI, however, comes with unique risks and challenges for government agencies (particularly in the space of ethics and bias). Mitigating these risks and challenges is important, but possible, and will allow agencies to recognise these benefits.
While the potential for efficiency gain is clear, there are inherent challenges to AI applications in the business of government. For example, regulatory and service delivery impacts must consider the potential for adverse impacts for both individuals and enterprises.
So – how does the public purpose sector approach this transformation in digital capability while also being diligent to ensure its responsible use? And – what insights were shared at this challenging seminar?
One of first (and one of many!) insights shared by Dr Katie Williams circulated around the value of using AI to redirect human resources towards more value adding tasks required of the public sector…
“The point I want to make here is with the ability to be more transparent about how we as public servants are using, in this case, a Gen AI platform to make it more efficient or effective. To divert our skill base from a relatively simple task, which let’s be honest, we might not really enjoy, to doing more value adding tasks and activities for the state of Queensland, for our communities, for Australia.” – Dr Katie Williams, UQ
Presenting the view of the corporate lens, and sharing the opportunities of the public sector, Fahim Khondaker shared his view of how AI can assist the public sector to do what it does best…
“I think the service delivery opportunity for the public sector is tremendous because we will be able to apply knowledge with things like how Nathan was talking, taking the body of knowledge from the public sector, the corpus of knowledge, training, the AI model with our version of what we wanted to be trained on. Our public servants will be able to apply that knowledge to situations very, very quickly. Then what they can do is what public servants do best, which is deliver the service with trust, with rapport, with empathy, and keep society functioning the way we want it functioning.” – Fahim Khondaker, BDO
An additional insight shared by Nathan Bines is how responsibility sits at the core of how the Queensland Government employs AI without compromising innovative thinking and approaches:
“You go back to the Australia card and people were really concerned the government having all this information that’s blown over. But even as recently as my health record, I think I don’t think we really solved the benefits of what this data could do for research and for government services. And we’ve seen that play out. I’ve been in the data space for years and using citizen data to better serve them. There’s always this concern about using my personal information and sharing it in government. We need to prove that we’re able to use and we have the effective controls in place to use AI in a secure, safe, ethical manner, to buy that licence, to be able to use citizen data to provide better services. We’ve got the right control. think that’s the fine line that government is always trading. We’re always held to a higher account, which is why generally we’ve been more conservative. But I think there’s opportunity to be innovative there too.” – Nathan Bines, Queensland Government
This event saw an esteemed panel of leading speakers come together to share insights and perspective on both the opportunities and the challenges of leveraging AI across the Queensland Government.
IPAA Queensland members can watch the entire event recording on the members portal.
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