Premier

1. The Western Cape Government is currently engaged in the testing of a number of AI POC’s (Proof-of-Concept) across various AI tools covering employee productivity, operational efficiency and service delivery improvement; including Microsoft Copilot, Speech-to-text, Natural Language Processor (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLM).

Some of these use-cases include:

• M365 Copilot - to optimise productivity on the M365 suite of Products (Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, amongst others)
• MS Teams Copilot- Meeting assist, Optimised collaboration and automatic summarisation, transcription and minuting of meetings
• Github Copilot – to improve systems development time and application security
• Github Advanced Security – automated security and vulnerability checks on code (systems development)
• Security Copilot - Automated Intrusion protection and scanning of logs for security breach patterns (Predictive & Prescriptive security intervention)
• Cloud FinOps - Multi-cloud management, including cost management
• Speech-to-text (DOHW & DSD)– to reduce admin overhead and allow more time with residents by automated note taking.
• Speech-to-text & Cognitive AI (POCS) – Optimise service delivery and use AI to analyse and capture video and still images.
• Cognitive AI - to summarise and auto-classify documents based on sensitivity labels.
• NLP and LLM (DOA) – Assist with climate modelling, predict soil health and crop yields, automated disease monitoring and early detection.
• NLP and LLM (DOHW) – Virtual healthcare, to optimise diagnosis, triage patients, wellness monitoring and burden of disease management.

2. Many of these initiatives currently remain in the Proof-of-Concept (POC) phase and it is thus not yet possible to report on municipal rollout at this stage. The Western Cape Government continues to support an innovative approach to the use of AI to improve service delivery in the Western Cape, and will continue to search for ways in which these technologies can assist our communities throughout the province.