Artificial intelligence at the gates of Quebec City

The centralization of the reception of citizen complaints and requests at 311 allowed a digital turn to Quebec City. In a few years, all the data collected will allow citizens to obtain better real -time services, supports the merchant administration.

It was a promise of the town hall candidate, Bruno Marchand, in 2021: to make the city data available for citizens. Four years later, his team said mission accomplished Even if there is still a lot of work to make them accessible.

In 2024, the city of Quebec received 222,424 requests at 311, the telephone and interactive service used for any questions, complaints and requests for non -urgent intervention of citizens.

All information is then listed and classified by district. And recently, they are public, often in real time, on the website of Quebec City, in the access to information section.

Among other things, one can see the data on the quality of the water of several municipal rivers, on the quality of the air in the districts or on the licensed permits. The city also makes the results of citizen satisfaction survey available to municipal services.

This first stage of information collection enabled the city to build a reliable database in the form of a dashboard. I see leverage for the futureexplains Pierre-Luc Lachance, vice-president of the executive committee, who will leave his functions at the end of the mandate.

When we talk about artificial intelligence, when the time comes to set up a conversational agent, 24 hours a day, 7 bears out of 7, he will rely on these databases there. We will be even more relevant to the citizensays Mr. Lachance.

The conversational agent, an artificial intelligence tool, will allow the citizen to obtain information at any time of the day. Pierre-Luc Lachance quotes the example of the municipality of Saint-Lin, in the Laurentians, which developed its own model.

We first have an organizational maturity to be taken to ensure secure integration of dataunderlines the city councilor. In parallel, the city forms its employees to ensure the future transition.

The merchant administration wishes to cross the latest stages in the close future, perhaps even during a second term.

It has to become a decision -making tool. Raw data is good, but when they are organized, that’s where it becomes interesting.

Make data useful

To date, the data collected by Quebec City is first used by decision -makers, municipal elected officials and members of the neighborhood councils. We still have an effort to tell citizens that they are availablerecognizes Claude Lavoie, municipal councilor responsible for the civic interaction file. Everything is there, at hand.

For the advisor, the more the citizens will know that they have access to first -line information, the less the pressure will be strong on the municipal teams which receive thousands of calls per year. Same thing for requests for access to information. The city now makes them available on its website. With more than 5000 requests per year, the publication of the results makes it possible not to do the same research twice.

The other advantage is that the data serves to guide decisions according to public dissatisfaction. Making data useful is an obsessioninsists Claude Lavoie.

For example, if citizens of a district claim a compulsory judgment at an intersection, the city is able to check if there have been complaints in the past to justify the addition of this infrastructure.

This is true in terms of road safety. This is also true to determine grant programs for neighborhood councils that claim funds for facade gardens or ecological lawns.

Transparency

The two strong and proud Quebec advisers believe that sharing knowledge with the general public is a way of fighting the cynicism of citizens who believe that elected officials hide information. It allows us a different dialoguebelieves Claude Lavoie. We are no longer in impressions and half-truths.

Pierre-Luc Lachance says that there was a certain resistance to the arrival of Quebec strong and proud in 2021 to initiate the change of culture compared to the data. Data is a strategic asset in Quebec Cityhe believes. It is also, in his opinion, a guarantee of trust between the administration, the politician and the citizens.