Public Sector
Minister demands AI becomes ‘basic expectation for all public entities’
The wave of layoffs attributable to the adoption of AI has washed up on the shores of New Zealand, which has announced an overhaul of its public service that will see the technology become a “basic expectation” for government agencies and help to make it possible to sack 9,000 staff - about 14 percent of current headcount.Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the job cuts yesterday, in a speech that saw her bemoan the fact that New Zealand’s government comprises 39 departments and ministries, and compared that to the 16 in Australia and 24 in the UK.She characterized the nation’s public service as “scared of AI, slow to move to the cloud” and said it operates a “complex and fragmented set of overlapping IT solutions.”
“Our government is as frustrated as you are by the fragmentation and silos, the complexity, the status-quo thinking and the dangerously slow take up of digital and AI technologies,” she added.
Aotearoa’s answer is to task its Chief Digital Officer “to embed AI deployment as a basic expectation for all public entities.”
