Exploring The Preparedness of South African Rural Municipalities in The Adoption and Use of Artificial Intelligence to Improve Service Delivery

This study sought to examine the preparedness of South African rural municipalities in the adoption and utilisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist them to deliver certain services such as the detection of fraud, healthcare monitoring, and improved communication with communities in an effective, efficient, and economic manner. The study adopted a mixed methods research approach. Non-probability sampling was used to purposively select sixty (n-60) IT municipal managers from twenty-four (n-24) municipalities and forty-one (n-41) responded to the closed-ended questions. Three (n-3) private sector IT consultants and four (n-4) SALGA officials participated in the interviews resulting in a sample size of forty-eight (n-48) participants. Telephonic interviews were conducted with eleven participants comprising of four (n-4) IT municipal managers from the 41 managers, three (n-3) private sector IT consultants and four (n-4) SALGA officials. The findings of the study revealed that the adoption of AI would create opportunities for improving access to information for communities, reduce corruption, increase transparency, and strengthen accountability. However, adoption was at the infant stage. The findings further revealed that utilisation of AI faced impediments such as infrastructure limitations, affordability, skills gap, uncertainty on services that could use AI as well as lack of policy directives. The findings also revealed that service areas in which AI could be adopted included efficient interaction with communities, improved request processing and application form handling, human resource management, reduction of paperwork through automation as well as assisting in decision-making. However, AI adoption would also result in job displacement for municipal employees particularly those without technological skills, and this was a concern for rural municipalities because of the scarcity of job opportunities in rural areas. The study recommends that rural municipalities should consider resolving the skills gap issue by upskilling employees for the adoption of AI to achieve its mandate.