DIA head and government chief digital officer Paul James. Photo: RNZ / Charlotte Cook
Internal Affairs says adopting a single AI app for government would risk having a single point of failure, such as as a hacking target.
MPs asked at a scrutiny week hearing on Wednesday where work is at on digitising Minister Judith Collins's push for more AI in public services.
DIA head and government chief digital officer Paul James said the aim was to unify the experience people had, but without going down the same single-app route as the likes of Shanghai in China.
"We wouldn't recommend that, but Shanghai has 1200 services on one app, as a city," James said.
"They instruct all their agencies to turn off their services and channels and everything else and put it onto one place.
"But you create a single point of risk and failure."
Collins announced a GovGPT app in September as a "first step" towards a digital "front door" for people to get services.
Their new plan - a service modernisation 'roadmap' issued this week - lined up with Collins's push to join things together.
"By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and other data-driven technologies, government agencies can tailor services to meet the specific needs of individuals, communities and businesses," said the department in a statement.
"To support this, we need strong digital foundations, like AI, Cloud and digital identity."
The three-year plan envisaged a lot of public agencies collaborating on digital services.
Internal Affairs has worked with the Ministry of Social Development to use its fledgling Identity Check tool that verifies a person via a selfie put through facial recognition.
Over 70,000 people used it in its first year, and DIA is promoting it further, now it has passed a test for racial bias in a small test on New Zealanders. Concerns among some Māori remain.
James told the select committee the Transport Agency was also making good progress such as with a digital drivers' licence.
In March, this extended to passports, to give people a single online place for lodging and tracking applications, and can now be lodged by groups of people; nine out of 10 are lodged online.
AI processing has been trialled by the Accident Compensation Corporation, and the National Library is looking at it to improve searches of its collections.
Deputy chief executive of digital public service, Ann-Marie Cavanagh, told MPs they were working to fine-tune AI models to recognise when people put private information in when perhaps they should not have, and other privacy controls.
James said New Zealand was in a leading pack of about 40 countries on digital government moves.
Singapore and South Korea were trailblazing with "some amazing things", he said.
Seoul has set up a hub that opens up 87,000 government datasets to train AI for training AI with.
South Korea and France top OECD rankings related to open data, but New Zealand (and Australia) ranked well down among "low" performers last year, due to gaps around data availability, accessibility and how government helped data be reused.
The new roadmap plan is led in part by five agencies on a digital executive board: Internal Affairs, IRD, the GCSB spy agency (with issues guidelines around data protection), the Public Service Commission and Stats NZ.
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