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ChatGPT hit the market only four months ago and the City of Kelowna is already using a version of it to reform how residents interact with government.

“One of the things you’re going to notice is Kelowna being a national leader in local government technology,” Jazz Pabla, the city’s information services director, told iNFOnews.ca. “Once we started doing this stuff, it didn’t take long to get recognized as kind of a leader in local government.”

That means, by summer, Kelowna will be the first city to allow citizens to use an interactive chatbot to get all the information they need about potential use of their land and the permits needed to renovate or develop – permits that are expected to be issued online by early next year.

Last winter, the city launched a snowbot so people could check on when their street was going to be plowed and the cut down on calls to the city by 80%.

Just this week, Oscar was launched as a chat bot for the Glenmore Landfill that allows users to access information on things like what can be recycled and where.

The Kelowna airport chatbot is being upgraded and there’s a city bot for inquires about City Hall and a revenue bot to deal with questions about things like property taxes and utility bills.

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By next year, Pabla hopes to provide access to City Hall using BCID (British Columbia identification) cards that now allow access to provincial and federal sites.

"It’s going to be an exciting 12 months," Pabla said. "And you’re going to see some stuff coming out right away because we have been working on it for a few years."

The city has used chatbots for some time now, but the release of the ChatGPT technology this past winter revolutionized how they approach using these interactive tools.

“We got lucky,” Pabla said. “We had a great relationship with Microsoft. I sit on the corporate council of Microsoft Canada as well.”

That council advises Microsoft on the technology needs of governments.

“We started to engage with them two years ago on these concepts so, when this new technology came knocking on our door, we were able to get advance access to these language models before the rest of the business world,” Pabla said. “We got access and starting to do this stuff a few months back then we started to realize we’ve really got something here.”

The city has hired a third party to hold it accountable to use the artificial technology ethically. It can only access City of Kelowna data.

While it has been a rapid response to changing technology, the shift started happening about three years ago when COVID hit and the world went online for things like banking, government, dining and shopping.

"We were looking at that and going: 'At City Hall we need to pivot, we need to absolutely pivot and provide the same type of experience, or try to, online as our citizens are used to in other areas,'" Pabla said.

He'd been hired shortly before that to change the culture at City Hall in terms of its approach to technology.

“A lot of it came right from the top, from (city manager) Doug Gilchrist about being the city of the future and about being innovative,” Pabla said. “I was brought in to bring this level of change within the organization and then I brought a team of leaders as well, over the last few years, and we’ve really changed the pace and the direction here.

"We’ve deployed certain methodologies to help us pivot and be more agile with new technology because, you can’t just sit on technology and expect it to last decades. That’s not the world we live in."

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It's not just about the pace of change, it’s also about how it’s used.

“The priority we have in IT is, number one, cybersecurity,” Pabla said. “But right after that is the digital citizen experience and that almost relentless approach to make sure the citizens have a good experience. We have a methodology that before we release technology we really focus on the user experience. We intentionally try to understand how people work and how people click and we design a solution that way.”

The technology is tested on random citizens through public engagement sessions and call outs as well as working with the development community,

“When you start to bring in these diverse minds and how people work, you get a pretty good idea,” Pabla said “One of the other things we do is, we take a lot of feedback throughout so we’re not quick to pivot if we notice that the solution isn’t hitting the mark.”

And it’s not just about developing interactive technology. It’s also about constant monitoring to make sure it works.

“Let’s say we start to notice people are getting lost in the chatbot experience,” Pabla said. “We are fixing it that day. We have individuals who are behind the scenes seeing when people are getting lost down that journey and we correct it as fast as possible to make sure it’s not a consistently poor experience because we really feel our citizens, if we give them these avenues and they start to use them, the experience better work.”

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