Implementation of AI in Oman government's social media: Decision maker's perspective

Artificial intelligence (AI) in social media has a potential to automate many tedious tasks related to social media management. This often involves using the power of AI to analyse social data at scale, understand what's being said in them, then extracting insights based on that information. Oman government has recently pushed awareness of AI to its citizens and aims to benefit it from their social media. In order to achieve these objectives, there may be several challenges that need to be overcome from the awareness, political, technological, legal and human capital aspects. This exploratory study investigates the readiness level of Oman government institutions to employ AI in their social media from decision makers’ perspectives. This study followed a qualitative descriptive approach with several stakeholders from different government institutions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve (12) participants in semi-structured interviews. A government guideline document was also used to support this study. The research sample consisted of six government institutions and one company from a private sector. The study uncovered challenges facing the implementation of AI in Oman government’s social media platforms. AI technology is seen to be an important and valuable tool by Oman government for their social media, as it could improve their administrative performance and productivity by automating processes or tasks that are currently being done manually. Participants agree on the importance of adopting AI technologies in social media, as they can benefit a lot from tools such as automatic chat applications (chatbot) and monitoring and analysis tools that can greatly contribute to improved government’s performance. Results also showed the importance of providing good infrastructure and meeting the requirements of modern technologies to start the AI adoption. Human capital through skill-building programs was agreed as one of the most important indicators of the readiness. In addition to that, educating citizens and beneficiaries of this technology and how to use it is equivalently important. The security side of this technology, along with legislation should be properly organized to prevent violations. The citizen is concerned with the security of information when interacting with government social media. This thesis culminates with recommendations for AI implementation strategies including government-private sector partnership, services and applications, policies and procedures and various other aspects in order to maximize the potential of AI in Oman government’s social media and overcoming the challenges for smooth rollout