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The City of Kelowna is at the forefront of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance municipal services and improve the day-to-day experiences of its residents and staff. Keep reading for some examples of how Kelowna is using AI and an invitation to hear from City staff on Dec. 4.

Digital assistants

Since 2020, the City of Kelowna has been using digital assistants to support customer service. These digital assistants, or chatbots, cover topics such as COVID-19, airport operations, recreation, elections, property taxes, utilities, snow clearing, landfill, building permits and bylaw. Depending on the topic and channel, they handle 25-75% of user inquiries without requiring staff intervention.

Kelowna’s digital assistants are built on a foundation of frequently asked questions and their answers, which are pre-programmed into our chatbot platform. Using Natural Language Understanding, the digital assistants can respond to a wide variety of common user questions. By integrating with relevant City systems, like airport security wait times or snow clearing time estimates, we enhance the service experience. And in some narrow use cases, we use generative AI to create new responses based on content from specific City documents, which helps decrease the instances of “I don’t know” type replies from our digital assistants.

Most recently, we’ve been using artificial intelligence to improve the user experience when we intake service requests through our voice assistants.

Microsoft Copilot

Implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI powered productivity tool, for more than 300 staff has significantly enhanced work efficiency and collaboration. Some of the staff use cases include summarizing large documents, taking meeting notes, writing first drafts of communications, creating PowerPoint presentations, helping with Excel formulas and analyzing data.

To ensure staff adopted and made use of the new Copilot tools, a Centre of Excellence was created as a dedicated space for sharing experiences and use cases with other City Copilot users, asking questions and learning from best practices. The Centre of Excellence was also used to facilitate a robust training program for onboarding staff.

Digital Transformation Team

The City’s Digital Transformation Team, a cross-functional group within Information Technology, is dedicated to redesigning current processes with higher levels of efficiency, leveraging automation and other digital solutions. In early 2023, the team conducted an internal survey to gather transformation ideas from staff throughout the organization, resulting in approximately 140 submissions. These ideas were reviewed and prioritized to determine which initiatives would have the most significant impact.

Some completed initiatives include the development of staff-facing chatbots to streamline workflows and the extraction of energy data from scanned building permit packages for analysis. Ongoing initiatives involve using AI to register Accounts Payable invoices, automating the preparation of Development Engineering memos, and automating the daily media monitoring task.

Responsible Artificial Intelligence Working Group

The City’s interdepartmental Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) Working Group is focused on promoting the ethical use of AI while helping staff feel empowered to innovate. The RAI Framework serves as the overarching vision, guiding the implementation of the RAI program, ensuring alignment between business, customer, financial and ethical considerations.