Pairing with AI for Public Sector Impact in Singapore

Overview

Since mid-2023, Open Government Products (OGP), an experimental tech team within the Singapore government, has rolled out the Pair suite of AI-powered tools for public officers: Pair Chat (a secure ChatGPT-like assistant), Pair Noms (meeting-minutes generation) and Pair Search (search over public government records). The products have over 60,000 registered users, more than 20,000 weekly active users, and over 10 million messages exchanged, saving officers an estimated 46% of time spent on administrative tasks. Data is kept private within government infrastructure and not logged on cloud providers.

The challenge

The rapid pace of AI advancements often outstrips public sectors' capacity to harness them meaningfully, and Singapore's public officers needed secure, government-context AI tools to reduce time spent on tedious tasks like writing meeting minutes and searching large government datasets.

The solution

Since mid-2023, Open Government Products (OGP), an experimental tech team within the Singapore government, rolled out the Pair suite of AI-powered tools: Pair Chat (a free, fast, secure ChatGPT-like assistant for public officers), Pair Noms (which transcribes, formats and generates government-style meeting minutes in under an hour), and Pair Search (search over public government records like parliamentary debates, Supreme Court judgments and legislation). The lean team of seven built the products through OGP's annual 'Hack for Public Good' hackathon and a product-first, bottom-up development approach, continuously performing applied R&D to evaluate and adopt new LLMs (e.g. GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet). All data is kept private within government infrastructure and not logged on cloud service providers.

Reported business value

The Pair suite has 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% of time spent on administrative tasks.