To ask the Minister for the Economy for an update on how his Department is utilising Artificial Intelligence.

My Department is not currently utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) but is active on a NICS wide Digital Leaders’ Forum looking at AI use cases to take forward as proof of concept projects.

We recently completed an exploratory project, undertaken via the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), to investigate technology to assist in measuring achievement in macro-economic indicators to drive coherent policy development and delivery. The suppliers who worked on this project considered how AI could be utilised, for example via Large Language Models (LLMs), to query documents, perform analysis, extract insights and provide written responses in natural language.