{"id":184620,"date":"2025-10-02T09:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T09:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/184620\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T09:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T09:04:09","slug":"b-c-cities-balance-security-and-efficiency-as-they-blaze-uncharted-ai-territory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/184620\/","title":{"rendered":"B.C. cities balance security and efficiency as they blaze uncharted AI territory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kelowna’s KAI chatbot is just one type of AI tool among many that municipalities are experimenting with<\/p>\n

To find\u00a0out, say, what height of fence\u00a0is allowed on their property, a Kelowna homeowner used to have to flip through 400 pages of bylaws.<\/p>\n

Now, people with zoning and permitting questions can ask KAI \u2014\u00a0the city’s own AI chatbot \u2014 and have it\u00a0guide them through the application process.<\/p>\n

“It is really the future when it comes to housing and permitting processes in\u00a0a lot of fast-growing cities,” said Ryan Smith, Kelowna’s planning director.<\/p>\n

In 2021, more than a year\u00a0before ChatGPT was released to the public, the City of Kelowna began working with Microsoft to develop the KAI chatbot and other tools that\u00a0help streamline operations and aid the effort to build more infill housing.<\/p>\n

Smith\u00a0said the idea of a city\u00a0creating\u00a0its own chatbot was “a little bit wild” at the time. But with\u00a0the support of a major developer, Kelowna plowed ahead.\u00a0 The city put up $350,000, which Smith said Microsoft matched\u00a0“like five times over.”<\/p>\n

One of its commitments was\u00a0to share what it learned in the process.<\/p>\n

Smith, alongside officials from Vancouver, made good on that at the Union of B.C. Municipalities’ (UBCM) annual conference in late September. They shared what they learned and also discussed some of the security and privacy issues that\u00a0came up along the way.<\/p>\n

The accounting firm KPMG released a survey of Canadian government workers in mid-September. It found\u00a048 per cent of respondents used AI tools in their work<\/a>, with 50 per cent of those using publicly available tools. The firm argues this\u00a0creates\u00a0risks\u00a0for data security and concerns about\u00a0potential exposure to biased or inaccurate information.<\/p>\n

Kelowna opted for a ground-up\u00a0approach\u00a0heavy on\u00a0experimentation,\u00a0while Vancouver worked from the top down, carefully selecting where to apply\u00a0AI tools\u00a0through committee meetings\u00a0and impact assessments.<\/p>\n

Learning on the fly<\/p>\n

At first, Smith was frustrated. He didn’t quite understand that AI systems couldn’t just come up with answers, but needed to\u00a0be taught.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“You needed people behind the scenes helping it,” he said.<\/p>\n

Without this training, and without consistent upkeep and use, the AI chatbots get “dumber,” Smith found.<\/p>\n

KAI needs to be asked a lot of questions so municipal employees can sift through to determine what it knows and what it does not know. There have been some “hallucinations” along the way, but for the most part, Smith said that when KAI doesn’t know something, it tells the user to contact a city employee for the answer.<\/p>\n

The team also\u00a0reviews the answer logs to ensure KAI is giving correct\u00a0answers. If they don’t do this, the chatbot can veer off course.<\/p>\n

\"251001-bpd-kai\"<\/p>\n

“If you’re not reviewing those logs, those answers aren’t going to get any better, and if they’re not being reinforced, it may start to add or change that answer,” Smith said.<\/p>\n

Smith and his team have\u00a0it dialed at this point so the chatbots can answer basic planning questions and guide people\u00a0through the application process. This saves\u00a0time for\u00a0homeowners, developers\u00a0and the city.<\/p>\n

Those are just the outward-facing tools. Smith is also using AI to develop mapping programs that can, for example, estimate\u00a0the redevelopment potential of properties in an area and help predict future growth.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0is all\u00a0a work in progress, and the city has abandoned some ideas \u2014 especially those that don’t get much use, therefore don’t provide enough\u00a0teaching opportunities.<\/p>\n

“Some things work great,\u00a0some things work really poorly,” Smith said.<\/p>\n

Then there is the question of how and when\u00a0to address\u00a0security and privacy. Smith acknowledged that Kelowna did things\u00a0“out of order” in this regard, creating the tools, then figuring out how to protect data.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“We were doing it before we were doing privacy impact assessments,” he said.<\/p>\n

But Kelowna had\u00a0spent\u00a018 months developing the chatbots before their unveiling, and\u00a0walled them\u00a0off from the open internet. Unlike ChatGPT, KAI learns only from the things that Smith’s team want it to learn from.<\/p>\n

While Kelowna takes\u00a0a ground-up approach to AI development, Vancouver is taking the opposite tack.<\/p>\n

Aman Sidhu, Vancouver’s director of enterprise data, analytics\u00a0and AI, has the view that “AI for the sake of AI is pointless,” so she approaches new tools\u00a0by first deciding on specific objectives to figure out how to offer better services and better decisions.<\/p>\n

This can be automating municipal processes or figuring out how to be more efficient in something as basic as garbage collection.<\/p>\n

Vancouver’s approach\u00a0began with the privacy implications. The city\u00a0even held\u00a0a hackathon to explore vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n

“We used privacy impact assessments (PIA) from the get-go,” she said. “We did not do any AI without a PIA.”<\/p>\n

Since that initial testing of the waters, Sidhu said the city has built an internal innovation cycle to develop new uses for AI.\u00a0One of the major\u00a0projects underway is a situational awareness engine to use during the FIFA World Cup games next summer. This can help officials understand how people are moving during the games in real time to address risk levels.<\/p>\n

Another project is a flood mapping program that the city is developing with the federal government. In total, Vancouver has 21 AI products in use or development.<\/p>\n

This does not mean the city can apply AI to anything. The\u00a0Tsleil-Waututh,\u00a0Musqueam and\u00a0Squamish nations asked the city\u00a0not to use their\u00a0data in AI applications.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While\u00a0Vancouver and other large municipalities make major AI investments, many of those\u00a0at the UBCM conference come from much smaller communities.\u00a0They want\u00a0to start using AI, but have\u00a0limited staff and funds. They also need to figure out how to do this safely and securely.<\/p>\n

Whistler Coun. Jeff Murl\u00a0put it bluntly, asking, “How do we get some of what you’ve got going on?”<\/p>\n

Murl said it was great to see two cities collaborate with the private sector to develop\u00a0these innovations, but his community does not have the same\u00a0resources.<\/p>\n

“I’d love to have even just a piece of that in my community,” he said.<\/p>\n

A solution to this could be to find those within an organization who have at least some level of AI competence and knowledge, and\u00a0then\u00a0build upon those skills, says Prof. Terri\u00a0Griffith, the\u00a0Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University.<\/p>\n

Griffith\u00a0studies organizations’ use of AI and advocates for a bottom-up approach that teaches basic levels of competence to everyone in the organization.<\/p>\n

Because the\u00a0technology is so new,\u00a0and\u00a0is being adopted by the public so much faster than previous technologies, such as\u00a0personal computers, organizations can usually find people within who are already interested or experienced\u00a0in using AI tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While local governments are trying to determine how and when to utilize new AI technology,\u00a0technological change is outpacing\u00a0regulation.\u00a0The\u00a0B.C. government, meanwhile, is not taking responsibility. A statement from the Ministry of Jobs and Economic Growth says the province has no oversight of local government\u00a0AI usage.<\/p>\n

Rick Glumac\u00a0is the\u00a0newly christened minister of state for AI and New Technology \u2014 tasked with\u00a0promoting AI development in the province. But an interview request for this story was refused, as was a request to discuss the issue with Diana\u00a0Gibson, minister of Citizens’ Services, who oversees much of the province’s internal AI usage.<\/p>\n

Griffith promotes a balance somewhere between Kelowna and Vancouver’s approach \u2014 organizations need to maintain security, but shouldn’t stifle innovation.<\/p>\n

And they need to be realistic about things like privacy impact assessments. Even if an organization has its computer systems locked down, employees will gravitate toward\u00a0easier ways of doing things and faster ways of looking things up.<\/p>\n

“They’ll never be able to do that assessment for every single thing that is happening in their organization, as much as they might want to,” Griffith said.<\/p>\n

The key for Griffith is to make sure all workers have a basic understanding of\u00a0AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This could help\u00a0prevent what could become a leaky information system. People have long made security mistakes and sent out things they should not \u2014 an errant email, perhaps \u2014 but Griffith said it is now easier than ever to make mistakes.<\/p>\n

“We can go back through the decades with the different ways that information can leak,” she said. “AI just makes it even easier.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kelowna’s KAI chatbot is just one type of AI tool among many that municipalities are experimenting with To…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,92958,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-184620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-breaking-newslocal-governmentai","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}