That little blue character in the bottom right corner of the City of Kelowna's website fielded 79,000 inquiries this year.

Image Credit: Submitted/City of Kelowna

In 2022, there were about 14,000 calls and texts handled by Kelowna City Hall’s Artificial Intelligence system but has jumped to 117,000 this year and is expected to grow as the services it provides continue to expand.

“We want to make it very easy for you to interact with City Hall,” Jazz Pabla, the city’s information services director, told iNFOnews.ca. “We understand this is going to bring more service requests and that’s OK. If people want more work done, then we should get more work done.”

The city is a national leader in the use of AI, Pabla said.

Certainly, that’s the case in the Planning Department where the city is pioneering the use of AI to help citizens do things like apply for permits for swimming pools and renovations.

READ MORE: Kelowna chat bot will get building permits approved in minutes, not weeks

But it also includes things like checking on when the snowplows last came down your street and when they might be expected to arrive again.

All it takes to access the city’s chat bot is to go to Kelowna.ca and click on the chat bot symbol in the bottom right corner. It’s a symbol, for those who are not familiar with it, that travels with them as they scroll up or down the page.

Right now it’s being used for Glenmore Landfill, property tax and utility inquiries, along with the snowbot.

READ MORE: Calling Kelowna about when your street will be plowed? Be ready to talk to Snowbot

But the city plans to expand that to all but fire and police departments next year and hopes to also make it multilingual.

“Anything that’s transactional – like you see a pothole and you want a pothole repaired – you call and say: ‘I see a pothole on the corner of this and this. Can someone repair it?’” Pabla said. “You don’t need a long drawn-out conversation with a human being to talk about a pothole. But, if you’ve got something wrong with your utility bill, that’s not where AI is going to excel.

“We’re fully aware of where human beings are needed. We’re not going to force the issue but we also know that, sometimes, citizens just want to put in a complaint about something and that’s it.”

Such complaints can be done anonymously – which is sometimes the preferred option when someone complaining to the bylaws department about a noisy neighbour. But users can also leave contact information so, once the pothole is patched, they can get a text or email letting them know.

There are two ways AI is being used. The vast majority of the 117,000 contacts this year (79,000) have been through the chat bot but the other 38,000 have been on phone lines to "digital assistants." The landfill “digital assistant,” for example, can provide information on things like tipping fees, opening hours or where to recycle a mattress.

AI has a bad reputation because of things like ChatGPT which tends to make a lot of mistakes.

That, Pabla said, is because ChatGPT accesses the entire Internet so it brings extraneous information into its work.

The city’s AI is much more narrowly focused.

“For example, somebody comes in and says I want to build an above-ground swimming pool. What drawings do I need?” Pabla explained. “The AI says: ‘Swimming pool and it’s above ground and it will have a drawing.’ It goes into that bylaw and it has an answer for you that is in plain English.”

It's narrowly focused and layered.

“When you go down a path with a permit – let’s say you go down the path of an above-ground swimming pool – we tell the AI to remove anything else that’s not related to that so its accuracy goes up,” Pabla said. “If you give AI billions and billions of pages of data, it’s not that great yet but, when you really hone it down, it’s pretty phenomenal.

“We don’t let it go outside certain guidelines and fences. If you’re in the swimming pool lane and asking questions about a swimming pool and then you say: ‘What time is the landfill open?’ It doesn’t know. Once you’re on that journey it stays on that journey. We give you options to come out of that journey but, once you’re on the journey, we want to make sure you get the most consistent answer.”

So, with more than 100,000 inquiries diverted from city staff to AI, does that mean jobs are on the line?

“AI is not fixing a pothole or removing graffiti off a wall,” Pabla said. “We’re just being notified there are these incidents happening and we’re making it easier to do so.”

There is no data available yet on how much the number of service requests has increased because of AI but, Pabla says, it’s obvious that making it easier to connect with City Hall means more requests are being made.

While AI is clearly handling tons of calls previously fielded by humans, layoffs are not on the horizon.

“I’ve been very clear, especially in front of council, that the goal is efficiency gains as much as possible,” Pabla said. “We feel this is a great way of doing it. But, letting people go is definitely not a goal of ours.

“With the city growing at a rapid pace – one of the fastest growing cities in Canada – how do we maintain that growth without necessarily having that same ratio of public to staff that we had before? AI will be a contributor to that so, instead of skyrocketing costs of full-time equivalents, it will be flattening it out a little bit.”

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