To ask the Minister of Justice to detail how Artificial Intelligence is being used by, and within (i) her Department; and (ii) the arm's length bodies sponsored by her Department.

(i) The Department

My Department has adopted a policy on the use of AI which follows an internal approval process involving technical experts and the Data Protection Officer, as well as oversight from the Department’s Senior Information Risk Owner. This ensures a full assessment of the risk is carried out before any business areas use AI Some of my officials use Microsoft Co-Pilot to aid with tasks such as background research, summarising complex documents, preparation of document templates and prioritisation of emails.

As most data management platforms now have an AI capability, my Department is also running a pilot to explore if there are datasets where the use of AI analysis could provide new insights on the data available.

(ii) ALBs

The Probation Board (PBNI), Criminal Justice Inspectorate, Police Rehabilitation and Retraining Trust (PRRT) and the Policing Board are all making use of Microsoft Co-Pilot to aid administrative tasks for a limited number of staff.

Current PSNI use of AI is focused on supporting administrative efficiency. This has included work on Voice-to-Text transcription. More recently, PSNI has also commenced pilot programmes involving general-use AI tools to support document summarisation, drafting and research functions, together with a HR chatbot designed to assist officers and staff in self-servicing HR-related queries.

All the ALBs using AI have processes in place to oversee the governance and assurance on the use of artificial intelligence.