Late passengers on flights, irate phone customers, and even hungry individuals yearning for a slice of pizza increasingly find their appeals to private companies being answered by artificial intelligence.

Soon, Canadians who need to communicate with the federal government may find themselves talking to non-human assistant employees.

Ottawa is working on a strategy to use more artificial intelligence in federal public service, and while it’s too early to say exactly how that might look, chatbots are one of the expected possibilities.

Stephen Burt, the Chief Data Officer for the government, stated that private sector call centers are using AI-generated chatbots to navigate internal data and help employees find better answers faster when customers call.

He said in an interview, "I can imagine a number of similar applications in the context of the Canadian government services we provide to clients, from unemployment insurance and old age security to immigration processes."

He mentioned that civil servants could also use AI to sort through vast piles of government data. In the Canadian Treasury Board alone, employees are responsible for government financial affairs, staffing, and technology used by the public service.

He also said, "There are a lot of documents that contain a lot of words on a lot of pages. It's hard even for people inside the government to understand in any particular situation what is most applicable."

The federal government plans to draft an AI strategy over the coming months, aiming to launch it next March. The plan is to encourage departments to experiment openly so that "they can see what works and what doesn’t."

Burt noted, "We can't do everything at once, and it's not clear to me yet what the cases will be (best use)."

When it comes to what will not be allowed, he said it’s too early to talk about red lines, although there are "definitely areas where we need to be more cautious."

Generative AI applications can produce text and images based on huge amounts of data fed into them.

The federal public service has already started dabbling in artificial intelligence. Joanna Redden, an assistant professor at Western University, has compiled a database documenting hundreds of governmental uses of AI in Canada.

It features a wide range of applications, from predicting the outcomes of tax cases to sorting temporary visa applications, tracking invasive plant species, and detecting whales from aerial images.

She noted that EU AI legislation prohibits certain uses, including untargeted scraping of images for facial recognition, using emotion recognition systems in workplaces and schools, social scoring, and some types of predictive policing.

At a preliminary event for the strategy in May, Treasury Board President Anita Anand stated that generative AI "will not be used generally" when it comes to sensitive matters, such as information only available to cabinet ministers behind closed doors.

According to University of Ottawa law professor Teresa Scassa, privacy legislation covering government activities needs to be updated.

She stated that the federal privacy law "has not really been adapted to the information society, let alone in the context of AI."

There may also be issues concerning the use of generative AI and the risk of it absorbing personal or confidential information.

She added, "Someone might decide to start responding to emails using generative AI, and how do you deal with that? What kind of information is fed into the system and who verifies it?"

Scassa also questioned whether there would be any avenue for redress if a government chatbot provided someone with incorrect information.

As Canada's largest employer, the federal government should look into integrating AI, as stated by Assistant Professor Vinyok McIlveen at Concordia University.

McIlveen suggested that the government could use chatbots "to help users understand and navigate their complex offerings," as well as to ensure government documents are accessible and clear.

Examples of this include filling out complex tax forms.

Redden had to compile her database of government AI from news reports, documents submitted to Parliament, and access to information requests.

Redden claimed that the government needs to better track its uses of AI and be transparent about its use, but it seems unlikely that Ottawa will change its approach under the new AI strategy.