Artificial Intelligence in public employment services: chatbot as a personal coach

In Finland, the government is undergoing a number of reforms in order to promote employment and improve the services for job seekers. These reforms require municipalities to take more responsibilities to guide individual job seekers. In this case, current staff of municipalities (personal coaches) would have more workload, resulting in low motivation and long-term communication to serve job seekers. Besides, job seekers would be disappointed with the services. AI has been widely used in many public sectors all over the world to facilitate the work flow of public services and reduce pressure on human resource. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate the possibility of applying AI chatbots, as personal coaches, to offer employment services that fulfill the user needs of job seekers, and thus reduce workloads of human career coaches and bring better services. This study was done under a research collaboration between the Department of Design, Aalto University, and the City of Espoo. Its research process included two parts: User Research and User Testing. The former part investigated citizens' attitudes and expectations towards applying AI in public employment services, through methods of online survey, co-design workshop, and guerrilla interviews. The latter one focused on the validation of the feasibility of applying AI chatbots in public employment services through a usability test on a chatbot prototype. Results from the User Research part showed that citizens had an overall positive attitude and expected AI could offer them services of job search, networking, career guidance and so on, while the User Testing results showed that AI chatbot could meet citizens' expectations and needs, and feasibly work as a personal coach in public employment services