[CTRL+ALT+FUTURE Feature] How AIBots have made work, work better for the Singapore Government

This article feature on AIBots was originally published in MDDI’s CTRL+ALT+FUTURE Tech Futures Newsletter, Vol 3 No 5, Sep 2024, reproduced with permission.

From the Editor’s Desk — 
“Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime”.

Welcome to the latest issue of CTRL + ALT + FUTURE!
This issue we’re diving deep into the development of AIBots. With AIBots, government agencies no longer need to hire engineers to create Generative AI Chatbots. Problem owners can develop these solutions themselves easily through AIBots and share their bots with their colleagues. The potential for AIBots to empower all public officers excites me the most

— Steven Koh, Director (Government Digital Products), GovTech

AIBots is a platform where Singapore Government agencies can create customised Generative AI chatbots. Officers are able to add internal knowledge bases, configure the bots for their use cases, and share their bots with teams — all under 15 mins.

In this issue, CTRL + ALT + FUTURE sat down with Louisa Ong, Product Manager of AIBots, to hear more about the product’s development history and lessons the team learnt along the way.

CAF: Tell us more about AIBots! How did the product first get off the ground?

Louisa: “Build and they will come” is usually bad product advice, but that was our experience. AIBots’s users came knocking and flooded us with requests — in a good way! 🥰

AIBots was built at a hackathon in July 2023 for public officers to create prototype chatbots powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), supplemented with a knowledge base processed using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). By then, most officers had used government LLM-based products like LaunchPad Playground or Pair. For power users, RAG was a low-cost way to effectively incorporate large amounts of contextual data compared to prompt engineering.

Although we didn’t promote AIBots for the following two months, some officers heard about it and were interested to use it; still others were directed to try it out as AIBots could accommodate file uploads. These officers were our first testers.

At that time, our engineering team had their plates full with ongoing products to manage, but they tried to accommodate minimal fixes to the prototype in order to make AIBots more usable. Simply via organic word-of-mouth, users came on board gradually and steadily.

CAF: What was one challenge the team faced?

Louisa: Building an internal platform for officers to easily create RAG LLM chatbots is an impressive engineering feat on its own, but there were other challenges in getting a product like AIBots out, such as navigating policy requirements.

When we put AIBots up for approval to start beta testing as required by the government circular on LLMs, we were told that each AI Bot would be considered an individual use case and would be approved individually. At this point, all bots could be viewed, edited, and used by all users, which meant that we needed to implement better user access management (UAM) for AIBots to be approved.

A passionate user, Talib Hameed (NEA), had an upcoming meeting with his senior management to showcase his bot, but he was at risk of losing access to AIBots entirely. We found a workaround by granting Talib sole access to AIBots, which was accepted. Talib’s showcase was a success and his team has since become a key champion of AIBots. In the end, our engineers found a creative way to implement a lite version of UAM in two days, rather than the expected one month!

After several months and 200+ individually-approved bots later, AIBots obtained a waiver where non-high risk use cases (i.e. 99.5% of bots) could proceed with beta testing without seeking approval. We officially announced this to existing users to welcome the release of AIBots V1.0 on 7 August 2024.

CAF: How do you manage all your users?

Louisa: AIBots turned out to be the perfect opportunity for users to develop independence. Problem owners can design, test, use, and release bots without involving an engineer! Our self-serve model emerged organically due to us having too many users, beyond what we could handle. Besides, being too accommodating can backfire if it makes people dependent on you — and we are a small team of four only since April 2024.

We also found creative ways to manage load. We had earlier agreed to pause development on V1.0 while creating a production-ready version. For user support, I compiled a giant collection of FAQs and formatted it into an introduction deck, which somehow kept our users satisfied.

Even so, I’d been receiving over 30 different messages, calls, or emails daily about AIBots for the past few months. I then used AIBots to create an About AI Bots Bot, uploading the intro deck as part of its knowledge base. I tested it out with users, added some guardrails, and got approval for full deployment. I linked to it on my auto-responder message while on holiday in March, and have left a modified version of the message on to this day! (No, I’m not always on leave…).

CAF: What’s next for AIBots?

Louisa: AIBots is expected to recover costs from our users. Thankfully, people are willing to pay a little for more features in the generative AI space, since its value is apparent to users. Providing generous access to generative AI as a central government lets us distribute costs, such as offering a subscription plan by agency instead of by individual and managing quotas similarly.

While competitors are on our heels, we know that our product is stable, users are happy, and our user base is constantly growing. This gives us much more room to breathe and refocus. We can finally proceed more deliberately and more cohesively, with more space for exploration and enjoyment. Even if our team got split and we’re only 4 people after the GovTech reorganisation, we’re here for the long run.

CTRL+ALT+FUTURE is a Tech Futures newsletter by the Ministry of Digital Development and Information. Sign up link: http://go.gov.sg/ctrl-alt-future

[CTRL+ALT+FUTURE Feature] How AIBots have made work, work better for the Singapore Government was originally published in Government Digital Products, Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.