“We’ve made a very bold statement in Alberta that we want to be North America’s most AI-enabled public service,” says Janak Alford, Deputy Minister of Technology and Innovation for the Government of Alberta. “And that is a reputation I think we’re living up to.”
It’s an ambitious claim from a public service — and that’s exactly the point. Public sector systems hold a tremendous amount of data and information and carry the responsibility of helping people live their lives.
That responsibility can often be a reason given for moving slowly. Alberta has treated it as a reason to move both deliberately and fast. Much of the work involves evolving the legacy applications that underpin major government activities, improving efficiency, effectiveness and speed, without losing what makes them work.
The results have been measurable. “Across multiple teams, we’ve been able to benchmark increasing our speed by as much as 20 times, and reducing our cost proportionately as much as 95 per cent,” says Alford.
Up to 20× faster. Up to 95% cost savings.
What sets Alberta apart, though, is how publicly it’s building. The province published its methodology in the Velocity White Papers, a series of 22 papers documenting how it is leveraging artificial intelligence to rapidly and securely transform government service and train its workforce through the Alberta AI Academy, shared so others can follow the same steps.
The Government of Alberta is working together with Microsoft to contribute to open-source assets like Pronghorn to provide a reusable foundation for building secure, scalable government applications and modernize legacy applications to secure modern architectures. Solutions like GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Azure, and Copilot Studio are helping to bring the ambitions in the Velocity White Papers to people within the Alberta public service and right across the country.
For John Weigelt, National Technology Officer at Microsoft Canada, the stakes extend past one province. “Canada’s prosperity relies upon our ability to use these tools effectively and for impact,” he says. “This is not just for technology. This is to change the way that we live our lives here in our great country.”
Alberta’s bet, ultimately, is on its people. “We know that the technology will change,” says Alford. “But if we can enable people and show them how to effectively use these tools, even as AI gets better, we’ll have a modern workforce who’s able to take on the challenge of the day.”
“Canada needs to adopt artificial intelligence effectively, and the public service can’t be an outlier,” adds Alford. “We can’t wait to find out what happens in two or three years with AI.”
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