Artificial Intelligence for the Public Sector

The Public Sector plays different roles with regard to AI. First, it acts as regulator, establishing the legal framework for the use of AI within society. Second, governments play also the role of accelerator, providing funding and support for the uptake of AI. Third, public sector organisations develop and use Artificial Intelligence. To explore these roles, with particular emphasis on the latter, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) of the European Commission jointly organised a webinar series and a “science for policy” conference in 2022. This report includes the conclusions of each one of the webinars, together with the material and main findings of the closing event. It reveals recent challenges, opportunities, and policy perspectives of the use of AI in the public sector, and distils a set of short takeaway messages. In a nutshell these finding are (i) AI in the public sector implies multi-stakeholders; (ii) experiment first, scale-up later; (iii) trustworthiness is a must; (iv) there is a need for upskilling public sector to be ready for the AI revolution; and (v) adapt procurement for digital and AI innovation. The report concludes that the AI promise is high for the society and in particular for the Public Sector, but the risks are not to be minimized. Europe has the ambition to succeed as whole in the digital transition powered by data and by AI-based applications, and wants to do it the European way, by putting citizens in the centre of this transformation.