LocationsPairing with AI for Public Sector Impact in Singapore
September 26, 2024
AI holds great potential in accelerating global progress towards the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals when harnessed in an inclusive and people-centred manner. Yet, the rapid pace of AI advancements often outstrips public sectors’ capacities to harness them meaningfully. The readiness gap could be even wider for developing countries and risks worsening global inequalities.
UNDP supports countries in the safe and inclusive adoption of AI. This includes numerous projects under the UNDP Accelerator Labs covering 115 countries, ready-to-scale solutions under the Digital X programme, AI Landscape Assessment, and AI for Development Analytics, among others. More broadly, UNDP works in 170 countries, helping to develop enabling environments, be it policy, infrastructure or skills. UNDP also stewards cooperation to promote responsible AI for sustainable development, including co-leading the design of the AI Hub for Sustainable Development with G7 Presidency.
There are positive steps globally in leveraging AI for public good. AI is powering real-time monitoring of gender-based attacks against women in Uruguay, enhancing efficiency and transparency of the justice process in Brazil, deploying intelligent anti-epidemic robots in Rwanda, supporting identification of harmful online content in the Arab region, and raising financial inclusion in Bangladesh.
In Singapore, the government has taken an innovative approach in developing a suite of general-purpose AI tools for public service officers, overcoming stringent security and technical barriers to transform public service delivery. Singapore’s journey provides key insights for others, showing that AI adoption in the public sector is achievable and impactful. By embracing Singaporean pragmatism and collaborating with problem owners, a small tech team has delivered significant and transformative results.
The Making of Singapore’s Pair Suite
Since mid-2023, Open Government Products (OGP), an experimental tech team in the Singapore government, has been rolling out the Pair suite of AI-powered solutions. It has automated day-to-day tasks of public servants and made searches of large government datasets instantaneous and intelligent. Today, these products have become the most popular way public officers utilise AI in their daily work, with over 60,000 registered users, more than 20,000 weekly active users, and over 10 million messages exchanged to date, saving officers an estimated 46% time spent on administrative tasks and raising public sector productivity.
The Pair suite encompasses various products that leverage large language models’ (LLMs) natural language processing capabilities to understand and generate human-like responses. Security has remained a key feature, ensuring that all data is kept private within the government, not logged on cloud service providers. Local adaptation is another key feature, ensuring accurate and relevant output for Singaporean users. Pair has shown that AI can be powerful and safe for the public sector.
Pair Chat for public officers of the Singapore government
The first product developed was Pair Chat - a free, fast, and secure version of ChatGPT for public officers. Pair Chat ensures that the underlying LLM technology works in the context of the Singapore Government and is used by public officers for a wide range of tasks. These include summarisation, translation, brainstorming, coding, and editorial use cases involving classified data and content.
Pair Noms for generating of government-style meeting minutes
After Pair Chat, the team focused on applying LLM’s to tasks specific to the Singapore government. One such task was the writing of meeting minutes, or Notes of Meetings (NOMs), which is a highly nuanced but tedious task within the public service. It can take civil servants anywhere from a few hours to a full work day to write NOMs. Pair Noms alleviates this effort by leveraging on advanced LLM-based technologies to help transcribe, format, and generate high-quality meeting minutes in under an hour.
Pair Search for key publicly accessible government records
Pair Search was subsequently developed to improve the search experience around publicly accessible government records like parliamentary debates, Supreme Court judgments, and legislation documents. The goal was to make these data sources easily searchable for anyone. It uses state-of-the-art search technology to offer relevant results simply, intuitively, and effectively and is currently utilized by the likes of public officers, lawyers, and citizens.
These innovative applications of AI technology in the public sector demonstrate Singapore's commitment to leveraging cutting-edge tools to enhance efficiency and accessibility of government services. Singapore's journey with the Pair suite offers key insights that other countries may consider when developing AI solutions for their governments.
- Cultivating an Ecosystem for AI Innovation
Pair and Singapore’s success in AI did not come by accident. Rather, OGP deliberately creates an environment that prioritizes innovation, experimentation, and learning. Every January, OGP officers set aside their regular duties to innovate on projects that meet public needs, as part of the “Hack for Public Good” initiative. Throughout the month, teams generate new ideas for public good problems, conduct extensive user research, and prototype actual solutions. Instead of a traditional top-down approach where product strategy and development is dictated by senior leadership, OGP’s bottom-up approach ensures that real problems present in the public sector are addressed, ultimately leading to practical and tested solutions.
Pair Chat was one of these solutions that emerged during the 2023 Hack for Public Good. Built by a small team of five people across different disciplines, Pair Chat’s success was replicated in the next year’s hackathon with the creation of Pair Noms and Pair Search.
From left to right: Moses Soh, Carina Lim, Sheikh Salim, Talitha Chin and Pallani Kumaran at OGP’s Hack for Public Good 2023
- Product First Development
It may come as a surprise that the Pair suite, powering a big part of Singapore’s public service, is driven by a lean team of seven interdisciplinary experts — a product manager, three software engineers, a product operations specialist, a policy officer and a product designer. Rather than subscribing to any one development methodology (e.g. agile, waterfall), the team follows their own approach driven by a product-first mentality.
The Pair team designing, developing and maintaining the Pair suite of products. From left to right: (back) Seah Ee Wei, Jie Yin Tan, Huiqing Lin and Rachel Tan, (front): Sheikh Salim, Oh Chin Yang and Bryan Ong
This centres around a continuous loop of obsessing over delivering good products that actual users adopt and building specific domain and product capabilities to fuel product development. Stressing on a culture of high autonomy and urgency, the team continuously refines products in the Pair suite in swift response to user feedback, embedded quantifiable metrics, and evolving needs of the public service landscape.
- Driving Learning and Adoption
Effective learning and adoption are crucial for successful implementation of AI tools. The team created a set of resources and playbooks called Pairwise to equip public officers to utilise the Pair tools. The Pair team also collaborated with Smart Nation Singapore and the Ministry of Digital Development and Information, to translate learnings from Pair into clear policy guardrails and technology pathways for broader AI adoption in the public sector.
- Rapid Applied Research & Development
The velocity of innovation in the AI/LLM space is unprecedented. In order to not only keep pace with the rapid development but to leverage newfound methods, models and technologies, the Pair team constantly performs applied R&D.
This entails keeping abreast of the latest developments in the field, from the highest performing models (e.g. OpenAI’s GPT 4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet in 2024) to new LLM prompting frameworks such as DSPy, and constantly iterating to find which ones are suitable for the problems that users are facing. This ensures the most applicable and advanced technologies are applied to Pair products for Singapore’s public officers.
As the AI/LLM space is relatively nascent, its application within the public sector is even more so. An aspect of applied R&D that is typically overlooked but crucial to its success is defining evaluation criteria to properly measure the impact of the research when applied directly on a problem statement. For example, the Pair team developed their own evaluation heuristics for Pair Noms to define what good government meeting minutes looks like, and subsequently evaluate the LLM-generated minutes using said criteria to ensure optimal outputs. Before applying the newest model for Pair products, the team performs multiple steps including referring to industry accepted evaluations, rigorously testing it internally, and running extensive trials on their current user base to ensure the best model is applied for the use case of public officers in Singapore.
Future developments in the pipeline for Pair Suite include new features customised for Singapore’s public sector context, expanded data sources, and improved performance while remaining simple and intuitive for public officer use cases. These are just the first few steps to harness the full potential of AI in Singapore’s public service, as envisioned in the national AI strategy 2.0.
Singapore’s experience demonstrates how efficient and innovative approaches can unlock AI's potential, providing invaluable lessons and inspiration for countries embarking on their own AI-driven transformations. If you are interested in learning more about the Pair team, or potentially collaborating on AI-related problems for public good, feel free to reach out to the team here.