Transforming social work with AI

Social workers face the daunting task of ensuring children are safe and supported, often in high-pressure situations where every minute counts. Yet, finding the right guidance in a mountain of complex regulation and policy documents can take hours— valuable time that is better spent with families. Recognizing this challenge, a provincial ministry providing children services* collaborated with Deloitte to develop a GenAI platform designed to assist social workers with policy navigation.

“Their true job isn’t policy navigation—it’s helping people,” says Senior Manager Stan Korsountsev of Technology & Transformation at Deloitte.

The project began by closely collaborating with frontline staff to understand social workers’ daily struggles.

“If you haven’t dealt with the same situation previously, you’re often trying to find a needle in the haystack,” says Stan. “We heard from social workers in some instances it can take hours to answer a single question.”

The AI platform changes this paradigm. Instead of sifting through countless documents, social workers will now be able to ask questions through a ChatGPT-style interface. The AI system searches all relevant policy and legal documents, then generates a clear referenced answer. In a recent demonstration, a scenario that once took four hours to resolve was answered in seconds.

“For instance, a foster parent might ask a social worker if they can buy hockey equipment for their child,” says Stan. “The policy documents may not mention ‘hockey equipment’ specifically because it’s so nuanced. But the AI system will show you the guidelines on what you can buy for kids based on their particular situation.”

This ability to navigate ambiguity and provide actionable guidance is enabling social workers to focus on the meaningful, human side of their work - supporting families and creating positive outcomes for children.

This AI tool is intuitive and accessible, as well as compatible across laptops, phones, and tablets. Importantly, it emphasizes responsible use by indicating multiple times through the answer provided to double check the documents, in addition to having citations. This reiterates to social workers that they remain responsible for verifying information and reviewing the source documents.

Currently, Deloitte is working with social policy subject matter experts to continuously improve the AI system’s accuracy and reliability. The rollout is in the early stages and proceeding carefully, with plans to provide access to 3,000 social workers when the app is fully in production. With this AI tool, the provincial ministry of children services is setting a new standard for empowering frontline social services that could potentially expand to all provinces across Canada.

*Client name withheld for confidentiality.