One of the chief topics of discussion at the G7 Speakers’ meeting in Verona was artificial intelligence (AI). In this respect, the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Lorenzo Fontana, illustrated a number of instances of the use of AI by the Italian Parliament.

President Fontana explained how, between April 2023 and January 2024, the Committee on documentation oversight of the Chamber of Deputies conducted a fact-finding investigation into how artificial intelligence could be deployed in support of parliamentary activity. As part of its investigation, the committee heard from experts from the sector and, on mission to the USA, met representatives of leading AI market players as well as academics.

The Parliament of Italy has been using AI applications for some time to produce and process information that, in the name of the transparency and the publicity of its proceedings, is available to the entire political community and published on its websites.

The first step was to automate the classification of parliamentary documents, with particular regard to parliamentary questions to the Government and resolutions. An important advance in recent years has been the introduction of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to produce reports of sittings. This innovative approach has won plaudits and is being emulated by other countries. The Chamber of Deputies, working in partnership with European institutions, has also made use of machine translation to publish sections of its website in English.