AI assistant is trained for the Swedish public sector

Published 23 May 2024 at 11.50

Domestic. Employees in three municipalities are now training an AI-powered assistant for the public sector.

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The project “A joint digital assistant for the public sector” is a collaboration between Swedish authorities, municipalities, regions and business, coordinated by AI Sweden. The aim is to promote national collaboration around AI for text tasks and create conditions for common solutions in the public sector.

By involving staff from, among other things, home care in the development work, the models must become relevant and effective for the specific tasks that exist in the respective operations. Within home care in particular, this means, for example, a tool that should make it easier for the staff to find information in the collected documentation that exists.

– The employees in the organizations have the most important role in the development of a digital assistant for the public sector. Developing AI tools that truly make a difference and create value requires more than just technical expertise. Solid knowledge and understanding of the specific business areas where the technology is to be applied is required. We need to combine domain knowledge and technical knowledge to be able to create tailored and value-creating AI solutions, says Jonatan Permert, project manager at AI Sweden, in a press release.

Gina Johannisson, method developer in Kungsbacka municipality, describes the change she want to see:

– The staff will be able to get answers directly on the phone when they are on site with the patient/care recipient. It will also make a big difference that the employees get answers quickly and with simple language, they don't have the time to sit and read long routines or guidelines. This will lead to the quality and safety of care being strengthened and the working environment being improved for the employees in care and care. As care and social care is facing a major challenge in being able to meet the increasing number of our patients, we need to find more efficient ways of working, and the digital assistant is part of that work, she says.

The Swedish public sector faces several challenges in the coming years, with the lack of personnel being one of the most central. According to forecasts from Sweden's municipalities and regions, 410,000 people will need to be recruited in the years up to and including 2031.

Increased use of artificial intelligence is considered to be a way to reduce the need for recruitment, by finding new ways of working that increase both the efficiency and quality of business processes. According to a calculation that DIGG, the Agency for Digital Management, published in 2019, AI has the potential to save SEK 140 billion a year in the public sector.

The training currently taking place in Tjörn, Kungsbacka and Gothenburg means that home care staff create answers to questions that will serve as examples for the language model to learn from. In the next step, this training will form the basis of actual AI services used by staff.

– This could be about more general text tasks, such as simplifying the language of a text or summarizing a document. But also to provide answers to specific questions based on the administration's own documentation. This means, among other things, that the employees will not have to search through masses of documents, but instead can ask questions directly to an AI assistant and receive tailored answers, says Jonatan Permert.

Until the summer, the first stage of the work with the assistant where the technical solution and methods for data generation and change management are developed, together with the three municipalities and the three regions that are involved in the project. After the summer, the project enters stage two, and then an upscaling will take place based on the lessons learned together with around 30 other municipalities, regions and authorities.