THE Jamaican Consulate in New York is to employ the use of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to assist with managing the large volume of calls it receives per year.

According to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Minister Senator Kamina Johnson Smith, last year the Consulate of Jamaica in New York received more than 2.2 million calls.

“No matter how we improve our phone systems — which we have, and it has reduced complaints — we can never staff up to manage 2.2 million calls per year. It is impossible. So the consul general has been very innovative and has proposed an AI tool to address our cause,” Johnson Smith said as she updated the Senate last Friday on some of the matters discussed at a Diaspora Town Hall meeting during the high level week of the 79th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York, last month.

Johnson Smith said the diaspora was sensitised on the new approach and system to provide improved consular service at the Jamaican Consulate in New York.

She said that the AI bot, being called Jacob, is now being trained and is a closed system that will not tap into Chat GPT or any of the broad spaces where people can access data.

“It’s a private system and one way in which our AI bot is being taught is the answers to questions about documentation that you need for visas, that you need for passports, where you can go to in Jamaica in different spaces, how you can contribute to different things — the questions that we regularly get that take extensive time, recognising that we unfortunately don’t have a large reading population,” she said.

Johnson Smith noted that while directing people to the information on the consular website, which is an improvement and has helped, it has been recognised that this is not enough for the Jamaican population overseas.

“They want to hear and therefore with this bot… you can ask him what do I need to get a visa and what this will do is take calls off of the system that take up staff time that reduce our ability to respond to calls. So it will help with customer service, help with customer satisfaction and it will also use technology positively and demonstrate how it is that innovation and technology can continue to deliver if you are thoughtful about how secure you are and how you can use it to help to solve practical problems which you have,” she said.

“So, I’m very excited about it… it is really one of these things that can be a game-changer. So, as soon as he’s fully launched, I will be inviting you all to call and test, but not to cause a rush on the system,” Johnson Smith said.