Information and Communications Technology Minister Melford Nicholas said the government plans to develop its own data center with the capacity to support artificial intelligence, as it looks to use information collected by public agencies to respond more quickly to national problems.
Speaking at an AI lecture at the University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus, Nicholas said the government would need to invest in more digital infrastructure as it prepares its next budget. He did not give a cost, construction timeline or location for the proposed center.
“We have to build, need I say it, our own data center with future AI capability,” Nicholas said.
The center would allow different streams of government information to flow into what he described as a “data lake” — a shared collection of records that officials could use to study problems and guide decisions.
Nicholas said the project would build on work already underway to digitize government services. He pointed to the electronic arrival and departure form, which replaced a paper form used by travelers, as an example of how collecting information digitally can serve several agencies.
According to Nicholas, the data has helped tourism officials see where visitors come from, how long they stay and which properties they use. He said it has also given the Ministry of Finance and Inland Revenue Department new information to compare with hotel tax records.
The minister said a government AI system would have to be trained to account for local conditions and backed by reliable Antigua and Barbuda data. To illustrate the problem, he described asking Cabinet colleagues to use different AI tools to find the date of the last execution in Antigua. They received conflicting answers, he said, because the relevant information was not readily available to the tools in digital form.
“If you do not have a sense of what the complete result looks like, how do you know that you have not been given a nicely worded pack of loose nonsense?” Nicholas asked.
He said the government has an obligation to make its services easier for the public to use and to become more efficient. But he cautioned that AI would not solve those challenges on its own: the quality of its answers would depend on the information supplied and the judgment of the people using it.
Nicholas did not say which government records would be included in the proposed system or how access to the data would be managed.
This article was originally published by Antigua News Room. Read the original article here: Antigua and Barbuda Plans Government Data Centre With AI Capability.