AI Assistant for Government Employee Learning and Support

Inform · Education & Learning

What it collects

About behaviour

Anonymized data

Natural-language queries typed by Government of Canada employees into the chatbot interface — questions about courses, enrolment, and CSPS services.

Operational data

Anonymized data

CSPS course catalogue and FAQ knowledge base, which form the retrieval corpus for the RAG pipeline.

Run by: Canada School of Public Service (CSPS)
Where: No fixed location
Kept: Not stated by the Helpful Places.
Shared with: Not stated by the Helpful Places.
Your copy: You cannot see the data it holds about you. What you can do

What it is for

Inform

Education & Learning

MAIA is a conversational AI chatbot integrated into the Canada School of Public Service's Client Contact Centre, designed to help Government of Canada employees find courses and get answers to common questions. It uses semantic search over FAQs and the CSPS course catalogue to provide relevant responses. Users are informed that they are interacting with an AI, and the system applies PII masking to protect personal information submitted in conversation.

What it collects and what happens to it

Data taken in

About behaviour

Anonymized data

Natural-language queries typed by Government of Canada employees into the chatbot interface — questions about courses, enrolment, and CSPS services.

Operational data

Anonymized data

CSPS course catalogue and FAQ knowledge base, which form the retrieval corpus for the RAG pipeline.

Processing

Language Models

Large language model underpinning the conversational chatbot, provided through the Amazon Web Services platform, generating natural-language responses grounded in retrieved FAQ and catalogue content.

Search & Retrieval

Semantic search (RAG) component that retrieves relevant passages from the CSPS FAQ and course catalogue in response to user queries before passing them to the language model.

Privacy-Preserving Transformation

PII masking applied to user inputs before processing, ensuring that personal information inadvertently submitted in chat messages is detected and redacted prior to being passed to the language model.

What it does

Understanding (Semantic AI)

Human decides

Retrieves and ranks relevant FAQ entries and course catalogue items using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to match user queries with appropriate content.

Creating (Generative AI)

Human decides

Generates conversational responses to user questions, composing answers from retrieved knowledge base content in a natural-language chatbot interaction.

Outputs

Generated content

Anonymized data

Natural-language chatbot responses providing answers to employee questions about CSPS courses, schedules, and services, composed by the language model from retrieved knowledge base content.

Run by

Canada School of Public Service (CSPS)

Government of Canada institution responsible for deploying and operating MAIA as part of its Client Contact Centre services.

GC AI Register — MAIA

Built by

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Technology vendor that supplied the underlying platform and infrastructure used to build MAIA.

GC AI Register — MAIA

Kept for

Not stated by the Helpful Places.

Shared with

Not available to me

The register states the system does not involve personal information. Individual users do not have a data-access mechanism exposed through this system.

Stored

Stored on 3rd Party Cloud

The system is built on the Amazon Web Services platform, indicating that data processed by MAIA is handled within AWS infrastructure. Specific storage region and data-residency commitments are not detailed in the register entry.
Duration: Not specified in the register

How to read the colours

Can it identify you?

Anonymized data: Data about people with the link to who is broken. Stripped of identifiers, blurred, aggregated, or noised so this system can’t reasonably tie a record back to an individual.
Pseudonymous data: Each person’s data is tied to a token (hash, ID, template) that lets this system recognise the same person across events, but the token itself doesn’t reveal a name. Reidentification is possible with extra information.
Identifiable data: The data either contains a direct identifier (name, address, account name, recognisable face or voice, plate number) or carries a token this system uses to look up legal identity during processing.

Who completes the loop?

Human decides: This mode suggests; a person decides what to do next. The AI is always advisory — a human is in the loop on every decision. Example: a triage tool ranks cases for a clinician who chooses which to see first.
Human executes: This mode decides; a person carries out the result. Example: an optimizer plans the day’s trash-collection routes, and drivers run them.
Autonomous: This mode decides and acts on its own. No person reviews each decision or carries out the resulting action.

Definitions from the DTPR standard. Amber is about your data, violet about who decides. The fuller the shape and the deeper the colour, the more identifying the data or the less a person is involved.

What you can do

Ask about this system

Questions go to the Helpful Places, not the vendor.

Your rights

Right to Be Informed of AI UseUsers are informed that they are interacting with an AI system before engaging with MAIA. The register explicitly confirms that AI use is disclosed to users.
Right to Algorithmic TransparencyThe Canada School of Public Service publishes a register entry describing MAIA's capabilities, data sources, and vendor. Government of Canada employees can consult the open data registry for information about how the system works.

Risks and safeguards

Psychological harmThe chatbot may generate inaccurate or misleading responses about available courses or services, causing employee confusion or eroded trust in institutional systems.Safeguard: Responses are grounded in a curated FAQ and course catalogue via RAG, limiting hallucination; AI use is disclosed so users know to verify critical information with human staff.