Artificial Intelligence adoption in Canadian public administration: a mixed-methods study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The economic and political climate expects public administration to do more with less. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can add immense value towards achieving these goals. However, AI use is accompanied by negative externalities on the environment and already at-risk populations. Against this backdrop of increasing rhetoric of AI benefits and its associated harms, this study explains the AI adoption phenomenon in public administration both from outside-in and inside-out perspectives. The context of the study is Canadian public administration, and the scope is limited to machine learning and natural language processing. This thesis consists of four papers. The first paper is an exploratory literature review. Through a cross-case analysis of thirty AI implementations, a typology of AI use cases is developed. The second paper is a systematic literature review and identifies technological, organisational, and environmental factors that influence AI adoption in public administration. The third and fourth papers are mixed-methods studies that draw on a cross-sectional survey (n=277) and semi-structured interviews (n=39). The third paper is grounded in institutional and sensemaking theories and explains factors that affect the perceived benefits of AI use in public administration and how they operate. The fourth paper is grounded in the resource-based view (RBV) of the firms and explains what resources and capabilities enable AI adoption in public administration and how these capabilities are developed. The study contributes to both theory and practice. Theoretical contributions include an updated AI innovation process expanding the diffusion of innovation theory within the context of AI. The study demonstrates black-box assumptions of the institutional theory and RBV can be explained by enumerating underlying mechanisms. Practitioner contributions include guidelines on four AI capability development paths with associated risks and benefits and recommendations on assessing organisational and technological AI readiness, crossing the operationalisation chasm, and managing negative perceptions of AI.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".