Written answers
Wednesday, 19 March 2025
Department of Public Expenditure and Reform
Artificial Intelligence
James Geoghegan (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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497. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform to identify specific examples where artificial intelligence has been adapted for the operation of his Department and each body under the aegis of his Department; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [12925/25]
Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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In relation to the use of AI, my Department has regard to relevant guidance published by the National Cyber Security Centre; the seven requirements for ethical AI that have been developed by the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on AI in their Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI; and the Interim Guidelines for the Use of AI in the Public Service. These Interim Guidelines, which were published by my Department, underscore the Government’s commitment to promoting the adoption of trustworthy AI in the Public Service and set out high level principles to support this (the interim Guidelines are available at www.gov.ie/en/publication/2127d-interim-guidelines-for-use-of-ai/. The Deputy may also wish to be aware that my Department is currently preparing more advanced, practice-orientated Guidelines for the Responsible Use of AI in the Public Service, including Generative AI.
The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) is a Division of my Department. As part of its work to support the Better Public Services and related Life Events programmes, it is working on the building blocks that make up Government as a Platform. One of those building blocks is AI oriented and ahead of any significant investment of development time and effort in area of AI, the OGCIO undertook some research and development in 2024 of GenAI technology that could be made available to the Public Service. The research was focused on exploring the potential of a chatbot AI agent (aka HubChat) to access Government information already in the public domain. Separately, my Department also undertook some research to explore potential uses of AI, particularly Large Language Models, and their ability to summarise research, utilising a closed repository of existing publications. This work took the form of a limited proof of concept, developed with IBM.
The position in respect of the bodies under the aegis of my Department is set out below.
| Body | Example of AI adapted for use |
|---|---|
| Office of Public Works | The OPW has deployed a trained AI large language model developed by a third party as part of a pilot project. The solution allows staff to summarise, compare and interact with large complex documents. Outputs include the creation of document summaries. Approx. 60 users are currently participating in the pilot. The learnings from the pilot will be used to inform a future AI Strategy for the organisation. The OPW has also enabled an AI feature on its Intranet to allow staff to interact with universally-available documents (e.g. policies, procedures, strategies etc. developed within the organisation). This solution enables staff to quickly search and retrieve salient information from a large collection of documents, and to interact with a document set in a conversational manner. |
| National Shared Services Office | The NSSO is working on AI projects relating to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Reader for Medical Certificates. |
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