ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – A CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC MANAGEMENT? ROMANIA VERSUS NORWAY

The development of public and private organizations is an irreversible process, but the pace at which it unfolds is different. While private organizations seek solutions to increase profit, public organizations, in the absence of a competitive environment, carry out their activity with less pressure on operating costs and with a slight passivity in the implementation of new reforms or technologies. Public managers are facing new technological challenges, with the development of artificial intelligence systems. The article aimed to conduct a comparative analysis regarding the implementation and intention to implement artificial intelligence tools in cities-municipalities in Romania versus those in Norway. The study of specialized literature highlighted the fact that in Norway there are extensive debates on the subject of the adoption of a legislative framework regarding the use of artificial intelligence in public institutions, while in Romania these are just beginning to take shape. The analysis carried out showed that in Norway, at the level of public organizations, from the perspective of the structural configuration, there are IT departments with a high number of employees. In Romanian municipalities, the number of workers with IT duties is under 10 civil servants, even if the number of employees in the institution exceeds in some situations over 800 or 1000. Of the nine municipalities in Romania analysed, in two of them, Cluj Napoca and Galați, virtual assistant solutions, called virtual civil servants chatbots, were implemented. In the context of the implementation of artificial intelligence, public management and all the functions it performs will need to be fundamentally rethought.