Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and government work at all levels. We will embrace this system technology without naivety: AI will play a lasting and transformative role. We will take the opportunities as one government and ensure the responsible use of AI and algorithms to safeguard transparency, security and democratic control while maintaining our service level, despite labour market shortages.
Why as 1 government?
- AI will affect all of our implementation processes, so we need an integrated policy to manage it.
- As a government, we want to exploit the opportunities provided by AI to solve societal problems and improve our services to citizens and entrepreneurs. To that end, we must combine our collective innovative strengths rather than going it alone as individual organisations. This approach requires intensive collaboration with the business sector and the scientific community.
- This includes removing barriers to AI’s innovation potential, which each organisation now faces individually.
- The current AI infrastructure is still too dependent on non-European AI developments. Facilitating the necessary AI infrastructure requires targeted and collective investments as one government.
Strategic goals
Together, we will set the following strategic goals for the Netherlands’ Digitalisation Strategy:
- We will utilise AI technology to solve societal problems and improve services to the Dutch public. We will take the lead through a single, unified approach, making successful applications usable for the entire government and removing obstacles to innovation.
- We will aim to develop a high-quality AI infrastructure used by the government and the public, consisting of high-quality data, open language models from the Netherlands or the EU, training and retention of available talent and sufficient computing power.
What obstacles currently exist?
- There is no guiding ‘one government’ approach to scaling up AI.
- No government-wide priority AI application areas have been designated for scale-up.
- There is no clear framework against which to assess the deployment, development and procurement of AI in a government context.
- There are still government-wide bottlenecks to AI deployment.
- There is a shortage of sufficient AI infrastructure.
- There is still insufficient use of open Dutch or European language models in government.
In what areas will we accelerate development as 1 government?
- We will take control of the scale-up of AI within government and explore the creation of an AI scale-up facility.
- We will select promising priority AI application areas and develop applications for government-wide use.
- We will establish common auditable standards for the ‘Use of AI by Government’, including an algorithm framework and procurement guidelines.
- We will explore the creation of a government-wide AI competence centre.
- We will work together to develop AI.
- We will use GPT-NL or other open language models for several priority use cases in government.
