Singapore's public service has never been afraid of innovation. Therefore, the move to integrate OpenAI's Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer -- ChatGPT -- into Microsoft Word for Government users, with the aim being to speed up work and free officers for higher level tasks is unsurprising. Those involved (not least GovTech's Open Government Products team) should be commended for their vision. The potential gains are evident. Enterprises of all sizes increasingly rely on tools that can automate mundane tasks, improve communications, and speed up customer support.

When GovTech conceptualized "Ask Jamie" in 2014, AI chatbots were still pretty much in their infancy. Ask Jamie was designed as a virtual assistant that can be implemented on government agency websites and trained to be able to answer queries within specific domains. Singapore has implemented Jamie in over 70 government agency websites. Some of Jamie's basic tasks include providing responses to citizens who have queries on basic information. Over the years, the AI chatbot evolved to handle more complex queries and issues as well.

The graph represents a network of 3,290 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "govtech", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Monday, 23 December 2019 at 07:09 UTC. The requested start date was Monday, 23 December 2019 at 01:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 13-day, 9-hour, 49-minute period from Monday, 09 December 2019 at 01:50 UTC to Sunday, 22 December 2019 at 11:39 UTC.

As a birthplace for global tech disrupters, Europe -- home to the likes of Spotify and Skype -- still lags behind the US and China and their juggernauts such as Apple, Alibaba, Google and Amazon. The continent is also falling behind North America and east Asia in artificial intelligence, as measured by investment and patent activity. A fragmented digital market, limited risk capital and onerous bureaucracy are several reasons cited for Europe playing catch up to Silicon Valley. However, Europe's more regulated, activist political culture has proved to be an asset, as highlighted by many of the region's start-ups tackling social-services issues in the "tech for good" sector and working directly with central and local governments in "govtech". Europe's start-ups reflect its public service traditions, says Paul Duan, founder of Bayes Impact, a non-profit group that built an AI -powered job counsellor.

Is your government ready for the Internet of Things (IoT)? The news media has been full of stories of self-driving cars being tested around the world and drones being used in diverse places. But a quiet global technology revolution is now occurring that is transforming the way we live and work in almost every area of life. And while robots at Amazon and smart home devices seem to be getting regular media attention, much more is happening in cyberspace. We live in exciting times with vast technological possibilities merging our online and offline lives.

Is your government ready for the Internet of Things (IoT)? The news media has been full of stories of self-driving cars being tested around the world and drones being used in diverse places. But a quiet global technology revolution is now occurring that is transforming the way we live and work in almost every area of life. And while robots at Amazon and smart home devices seem to be getting regular media attention, much more is happening in cyberspace. We live in exciting times with vast technological possibilities merging our online and offline lives.