The City of Perth is contemplating turning to AI to help with its workload amid an exodus of staff.<\/p>\n
It was revealed last month job offers at the city are being knocked back and staff are walking out<\/a> as the local government tries to deal with a damning independent risk assessment<\/a>.<\/p>\n Since August, eight staff members in key governance and elected member support roles have walked out, five of them since November.<\/p>\n Others have taken extended \u201cunanticipated personal leave\u201d, pushing workforce depletion to what the report describes as \u201chigh risk\u201d.<\/p>\n The council was told last month the CEO alliance and governance team had been \u201csignificantly depleted\u201d, leaving them struggling to complete basic operations.<\/p>\n Staff have recently begun recording elected member engagement sessions and budget workshops, and have been using Microsoft Copilot to help them do so.<\/p>\n They want to expand its use to record the city\u2019s audit, risk and improvement, CEO performance review, and policy, legislation and governance committee meetings.<\/p>\n A report to the council\u2019s March meeting said this would help staff cope with current resource constraints.<\/p>\n \u201cPreparing accurate minutes for these meetings is a labour-intensive process and for significant meetings, this can require substantial effort from governance staff,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n \u201cRecent difficulties in the attraction and retention of governance staff is presenting a significant risk to business continuity for the city.\u201d<\/p>\n The report said it was intended to support and not replace current processes or the responsibility of the minute-taker or CEO.<\/p>\n Copilot recordings would be treated as drafts only and its summaries would be reviewed by the minute-taker before being confirmed by the city\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n The council was poised to vote to accept its use at its March 31 meeting but ultimately voted to put it off for a month.<\/p>\n Deputy Lord Mayor David Goncalves said he wanted to amend the proposal but other council members and staff said they had not had enough time to consider it.<\/p>\n Cr Goncalves had wanted council members to be able to ask for a confidential copy of audio recordings or transcript for \u201cgovernance or verification purposes\u201d and for a city record of recordings, transcripts and notes.<\/p>\n But Cr Raj Doshi pushed for the decision to be deferred as she said it was \u201cagain a last-minute submission\u201d and city staff had not been able to assess it.<\/p>\n CEO Michelle Reynolds said staff had not been able to consider the consequences of Cr Goncalves\u2019 proposal.<\/p>\n \u201cThe information that has been provided to elected members relates to using Copilot not for the purposes of transcription, only for the purposes of very high-level minutes,\u201d Ms Reynolds said.<\/p>\n Cr Goncalves interrupted during Ms Reynolds\u2019 response but Lord Mayor Bruce Reynolds said to let Ms Reynolds finish \u201cas she\u2019s still going\u201d.<\/p>\n Ms Reynolds continued by saying she was cautious around \u201cunintended consequences\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m particularly cautious around confidentiality and anything that we might inadvertently cause, so I would very much appreciate the opportunity to take this away to enable us to get some proper advice,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Mr Reynolds then told Cr Goncalves there was no debate on motions to defer decisions.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what I was going to point out, that the CEO has now contributed to debate,\u201d Cr Goncalves said.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, I\u2019ve allowed it. That\u2019s OK,\u201d Mr Reynolds said.<\/p>\n The proposal is now scheduled to be considered at this month\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The City of Perth is contemplating turning to AI to help with its workload amid an exodus of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,505,135,44,46,84,105,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-597760","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-central","14":"tag-local-government","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-perth","17":"tag-politics","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-wa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}