by Sophie Wright, GovAI Product Manager, AI Delivery and Enablement Branch, Department of Finance
Since I first joined the public service as an APS 2 (what feels like a thousand years ago), a lot of things have changed. Other things are exactly the same.
The technology has evolved, but the commitment and dedication of the APS hasn’t. Public servants are still working at pace, thoughtful and accountable, working to tight timelines to deliver positive outcomes with care.
Working with creative, innovative teams to help government achieve policy and program outcomes has always been something that motivates me. It’s exciting to work on things that really matter, and have positive impacts on Australians.
I love the challenge of understanding how to design and deliver new technology to help public servants do what they need to do as safely, easily and quickly as possible. I also get pretty nerdy and excited about understanding what’s real and what’s hype with AI and automation.
That’s what draws me to the possibilities of GovAI Chat.
What GovAI Chat is all about
GovAI Chat is being designed to support the real work public servants do every day.
It provides an AI capability to support different roles, tasks and agency contexts. It gives public servants secure, onshore access to approved AI models, so they can choose the right tool for the job while staying within the safety guardrails government requires. It’s designed to support your professional work, but of course not replace the important professional judgement you make in your world.
GovAI Chat also offers a range of different AI models (like Claude, ChatGPT and Mistral), with additional models currently being considered for inclusion.
In the early stages of the build, you can use GovAI Chat to:
- learn how to craft helpful prompts in GovAI Chat to get the outputs you need
- summarise complex policy or program information
- refine content to be more easily understood
- brainstorm and critique ideas to support research and analysis
- help with time management and focus and more.
We’re delivering the core foundation capability of GovAI Chat over two key stages of the trial, including Alpha and Beta stages. This will help us confirm what works, identify what doesn’t, learn quickly and enhance GovAI Chat to make sure it’s useful for public sector staff.
We’re excited to see what future possibilities we can validate and build next.
Focusing on safety, simplicity and trust
Safety and security are the most important things for us to build trust and ensure people want to use GovAI Chat as one of their trusted tools, so getting this right is our biggest focus. GovAI Chat provides approved models (aligned to government requirements) to help you in your work, and provides a clear guidance on what – or not - is safe to share within your conversations.
Government tools also need to be reliable, intuitive and genuinely helpful. If we want people to use AI safely, easily and confidently, we know we have to make it intuitive enough to fit into the flow of that work, without adding unnecessary complexity.
In early stages of implementing any AI and automation capability, validating outputs with a “human in the loop” is critical. We’re building GovAI Chat to help people do their job more effectively while keeping accountability and judgement with the person using it, so the need for an engaged human with specific government expertise will always be a part of the process. To support this, you can export your conversation into a screenshot or PDF to transparently share how AI informed your thinking with reviewers, and save these as audit records if needed.
We’re also supporting strong review processes and compliance with legislative requirements, so users can print or share their Chat outputs to demonstrate where AI helped shape thinking and also validate references for trusted web searches.
The biggest opportunity for GovAI Chat
So how do we know what’s valuable for the APS (and not just hype) in an AI tool? That one’s easy. We’re asking the people who do the work every day.
One of the things I’m most excited about is that we’re deliberately seeking feedback from APS staff to understand what functionality is most important and then feeding that into our roadmap for delivery.
It’s important that GovAI Chat lives up to its promise - “Built for the APS, by the APS”. We have an incredible opportunity to engage with public servants to understand where AI can genuinely make things easier and where it can help deliver better outcomes.
If we don’t get broad input, results and comments from a variety of roles and agencies across the APS, we risk building something that reflects only a narrow set of needs or assumptions.
The more usage and feedback we get, the better chance we have of building something that is genuinely useful. We’ll also be able to rely on an evidence base of real data to shape what we’re building, prioritise features and prove what’s valuable.
APS engagement has already started, we’ve had valuable input and feedback from more than 40 departments and agencies, 3,000 staff (including state and territory offices) attending information sessions, and 120 participants in a UX survey to help shape GovAI Chat. We can’t wait to keep that collaboration going, and also to share learnings with other teams implementing AI initiatives.
How AI helps me
One of the things I love most about working in this space is how it’s changing the way I think – in a positive way.
I use GovAI Chat as a thinking partner to challenge my ideas, test assumptions, critique recommendations and help identify gaps.
Instead of AI making my brain lazy, I’m using it to continually push for a better output and coach me with the knowledge and learnings from some of the best and brightest minds in my industry.
Here’s an example prompt I often use:
You are an expert [insert a role/skillset] with deep, world-leading expertise in [insert your topic/focus area].
I'm working on [describe your challenge or problem – using Official content only].
Coach me to help reframe this problem by:
- Identifying any assumptions I might be making
- Calling out any potential gaps in logic or the approach
- Suggesting 3-5 alternative ways to view or define this problem
- Highlighting what might be the real underlying issue
- Suggesting up to 10 Australian and global leaders in [the problem space] that I can research to better inform the problem or help understand competing viewpoints. Include a diverse range of genders, backgrounds, ages and lived experiences.
- Keep responses practical for the APS context.
- Ask me any questions you need to craft a better response.
An invitation
For anyone seeing the GovAI Chat trial roll out and wondering if AI can help you, we’d love you to get involved.
Test GovAI Chat by supporting the work you already do, no AI experience necessary. Tell us what you like, or what you don’t. Help us by clicking on the thumbs up / thumbs down or submit a ticket if something doesn’t work as you expect. Tell the models if their answers aren’t quite right and use the feedback form to share your thoughts or tell us what should come next. If you can, it would be great if you could tell us what task you were trying to complete and what output you expected, as this context will help us improve GovAI Chat more quickly.
We don’t know all the possibilities of GovAI Chat yet, but we do know we’ll build something useful if we ask good questions, listen carefully to feedback and keep learning as we build.
If you’re interested in joining the GovAI Chat trial, submit your Expression of Interest at https://www.govai.gov.au/GovAIChatEOI.