The City of Helsinki has embarked on a trial of AI to understand how it could be used within its operations. The City is trialing the Microsoft Copilot with a view to improving productivity of its own operations.

The experiment also aims to develop the general competence and understanding regarding AI among the city’s employees as well as support for the use of AI.   In November, the City of Helsinki announced that it was adopting a responsible approach to AI in its operations, and had drawn up ethical principles to control the application and use of AI within the City administration.

The Copilot trial runs from January to October and involves a total of 1,000 employees across the city organisation. The participants of the experiment consist of teams whose work involves considerable use of Microsoft 365 tools such as Teams or Word.

Teams that process personal data or are in direct contact with city residents have been excluded from the experiment because the use of the new technology involves legal and data protection issues that are yet to be resolved. Artificial intelligence will also not be used in recruitment. 

“Our goal is to learn what benefits Copilot can provide to make knowledge work more efficient and what work tasks the tool is best suited to. Our Copilot experiment makes us pioneers in Finland, as we will be among the first to test the tool,” said Tomas Lehtinen, Head of Data at the City of Helsinki.

The City of Helsinki adopted eight ethical principles in November to govern use of AI and data by the City. These are human-centredness, transparency, explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, accountability and trust, privacy, safety, and human oversight over AI operations.

According to the City, it is developing a number of AI applications. By using the ethical principles, the City aims to minimise the ethical risks related to the use of data and artificial intelligence.

In practice, the use of the ethical principles means applying them to the City’s AI-based services. The AI-based services are founded on the fact that machine learning can be used to predict certain things.

Part of the ethical use of artificial intelligence is the City’s AI Register, which introduces the AI systems used in Helsinki.