Mr. Barry Lowry:

I can only talk about the particular experiment we did, which was a proof of concept sponsored by the Department of enterprise. It was looking at whether a chatbot could help in the process of advising people who wanted to set up a business. That was extensively tested with various volunteers and finally tested with people in Dublin City University who were interested in setting up a business. All the feedback was collated from that and that will inform the decisions the Department makes going forward. It was a very useful experiment because one the things we talk about in designing a chatbot-type LLM solution is that the user journey is understood. People will approach accessing Government information or services with different needs and the system has to take account of those needs. In this particular case, they thought they had taken account of everything. When the system was tested with students who were serious about setting up their own business, one of the feedbacks was that they thought it was quite patronising and it went too far in being too helpful. It is those sorts of learnings that we need to take on board as we use these actively in the future.