Good morning.
In Kelowna, our experience with the use of artificial intelligence goes back about two and a half years. We wrote a grant application to the provincial government, with the aim of using some artificial intelligence tools to help us improve our planning and development processes. We were successful in that grant application, and that grant application involved a partnership with Microsoft and the use of their artificial intelligence technologies. The goal was probably twofold: to improve our development processes in Kelowna, as well as provide better customer service to those in our planning and development community, and to learn where else we could use it.
This wasn't our first use of the tool in Kelowna. We have a number of different tools—we call them chatbots—that are artificial intelligence based.
I am not an IT person—I'm a city planner—so my depth of understanding of the technical side of it is low. However, I am an administrator and do look after a workforce of 85 people, who will all soon have access to the tools that we're creating.
What we've created is a sort of front-end concierge service for those looking to use our planning and development services in Kelowna. It will help the average person who does not understand what they would need to make a building permit application. It will help them into our process of making an application, to make it more accessible, with everything they would need to know to make a building permit application.
We're hoping that when we make that process easier and are able to answer more questions with the use of our artificial intelligence chatbot tool, we'll have less burden on our frontline staff who regularly process building and development applications, and who are overwhelmed and under-resourced.
The second aspect is that we also have a high turnover with our frontline staff and their knowledge base is not increasing because of that. A lot of them are within six months or a year on the job, and they don't have the breadth of understanding that a clerk who has been on the job for 20 years would have. The use of the artificial intelligence tools that we're developing will also help them to provide feedback more quickly, with fewer clicks.
We also participate in the ethical side of the use of AI. Our IT director has been involved, at the provincial level, in developing policy related to the rollout of artificial intelligence and our local government processes.