One way to improve productivity is to provide Canadians with better tools to do their jobs. The better the tools, the higher the capacity, the more productive. This is easy to imagine when picturing physical tools, and harder when strategizing on how to improve the productivity of Canada’s public service—a mostly office-based workforce. 

Generative AI, while not a stand-alone solution, should be part of any broad-based productivity strategy. The generative AI revolution is different than anything that’s come before it. Anyone can use it to automate or augment basic tasks, but generative AI is already showing potential to reinvent entire processes. With generative AI, we are on the precipice of the most significant change in work since the agricultural and industrial revolutions. 

The federal government has been responding with major investment and legislation. In Budget 2024, the government committed significant funding to AI in Canada—directly connecting it to productivity. And in August, Minister Anita Anand, President of the Treasury Board announced a working group to examine productivity and inform government economic policy. Additionally, Minister Anand announced public consultation on Canada’s first generative AI strategy for the federal public service. Broad consultation is a great start, so long as it motivates progress and action.

Federal Government services and spending make up an estimated 16% of Canada’s GDP. Efficient and productive government is essential to improve services and support our global competitiveness—productivity improvements can help move the needle in a real way. 

Through this transition, Governments should leverage the expertise and experience of private sector technology companies—and that’s why bringing together experts in citizen services, public policy, and technology, is so important.

In the federal government, responsibility for generative AI adoption is spread across various departments. While internal generative AI policy is led by the Treasury Board, purchasing generative AI from vendors is Public Service and Procurement Canada with support from Shared Services Canada (SSC), and adoption is primarily left to line-departments who each have their own history with tech adoption. Currently the federal government and agencies have adopted over 300 different examples of AI technology. While that is encouraging, we should aim for more department-wide tracking and consistency across all to better drive transformation. 

To implement this groundbreaking technology responsibly and deliver outcomes, leaders need to lead and learn in new ways—and not lose sight of the people who will be using the tools. This means setting and guiding a vision for how to reinvent work, reshaping the workforce and preparing workers for a generative AI world, while building a resilient culture to build and maintain trust as well as navigate continuous change. 

Intelligent document processing is a clear example of this technology’s power. Rather than manual data entry, document processing converts analog documents into digital data using natural language processing, computer vision and machine learning to read and extract information so it can be used digitally. Government agencies can use intelligent document processing to process high volumes of documents, ultimately bringing down backlogs and wait-times experienced currently by many Canadians. 

Given the progress and trends already witnessed, there are diverse views about the risks, benefits and tradeoffs involved with using gen AI. Accenture research has found that there are perception and trust gaps to deploying gen AI that must be understood and navigated. By proactively resolving these challenges, we can focus on the opportunities ahead.

Tackling massive backlogs by hiring more people hasn’t been working; generative AI can make a real impact. Governments should remain mindful for the need to move quickly from proof of concepts to focus on identifying value and scaling it up across an entire organization. 

The time is now for governments in Canada to start working on adopting generative AI, and our skilled and educated public service workers can help drive the change. However, this shouldn’t be done by individuals in isolated departments. Accenture is pleased that Treasury Board and Minister Anand are starting an important multi-sector conversation to determine how the federal government can work on improving their productivity for the betterment of all citizens. 

Chris McPhee is a Managing Director with Accenture, specializing in Digital & Data Transformations within the Canada Public Service. Chris will be presenting at the AWS Ottawa Symposium this Wednesday Oct 9 on Accenture’s POV of How AI unleashes the next level of human potential in their session Improving Government Productivity with Traditional and Generative AI.