The Fiji Public Service Commission (PSC) chairman Luke Rokovada says artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly boost efficiency and productivity across the public service.
He said both AI and digital transformation were thoroughly discussed in the four-day Pacific Public Service Leaders Conference, FONO 2025 held in Suva last week.
“Everybody embraced to go digital, and also in terms of digital transformation, and also embracing artificial intelligence,” Mr Rokovada said.
“We feel that there are positives in artificial intelligence. We have to take in the good things about artificial intelligence.
“It will help in terms of making our work more productive. You can do things fairly fast, you save on manpower and time.”
He said they believed AI could create new opportunities at the workplace.
“I think there’s a lot that we need to improve in terms of services and AI, we feel will help a lot in speeding up our work, making work more efficient, and also making people more productive.
“The country benefits, we feel with AI, but we have to be very careful.
“We have to pick the good things that we can benefit from artificial intelligence.”
When asked whether the introduction of AI could lead to job loss, Mr Rokovada said we have to safeguard that.
“It doesn’t mean that people will lose their jobs.
“We hope not, and we have to safeguard that.
“I have already stated that we don’t think that will result in people losing jobs.”
He said it must be ensured that there were policies developed to safeguard people’s employment contracts.
“At least in the public service, we will ensure that we have policies that safeguard people’s work, safeguard their career, safeguard the other things that might be adverse to the introduction of AI.
“So, we have to build safeguards in terms of the using of AI at work.
“But we see enormous benefits from that.
“And we will make sure that we take the opportunities to use AI in a manner that is favourable to the workplace, favourable to productivity, and favourable to the country because while we speed up work, there are new opportunities that come, that we can also utilise people by using AI.”
