A council policy on how it will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not intended to lead to job losses, a meeting has been told.
A meeting of South Holland District Council’s Policy Development Panel was told that the authority was looking to use the developing technology to make it more efficient.
But Corey Gooch the authority’s business intelligence and change manager, stressed it was efficiencies so human resources can be moved elsewhere.
“There’s efficiencies you could have with AI and we’d love to have them,” he said: “This policy is about setting the groundwork of what’s to come.
“We need to do it in the right way.
“As far as the council is concerned, those jobs that can be done by AI should be and that frees up the resources that can be redirected.
“This is not about taking away jobs. It’s about freeing up capacity and moving it to a more crucial area.
“That’s where the efficiency comes in.
“AI itself is creating more jobs in the market.
“Depending on where we go with the council, we might be looking to bring in more people in that area.
“Some councils are further along in their journey with AI and some are taking their first steps like we are.”
Ways Mr Gooch highlighted of how it could be used was with Freedom Of Information requests and ChatBots open 24/7 rather than the current customer service only available during office hours.
“We get thousands of calls a year of what you would deem is quite simple questions, such as when does my bin need to be put out,” he said. “These take up capacity of the phone lines and the goal for AI you could ask it simple questions and reply back with the page on our website with the correct information.
“That frees up capacity for our more vulnerable residents who do need to get through to us, rather than having to make them wait.
“A lot of the time AI would be used to do very simple tasks.
“I wouldn’t expect AI to answer ever query, but as a sort of pop up thing, that’s what we’d look to.”
Councillors expressed the desire that human contact away from the internet remained with Coun Andrew Woolf stating: “We know our demographic.”
