From the hospital to city hall to the classroom, artificial intelligence is making its way into Mission’s foremost institutions.
The City of Mission, Fraser Health, Mission RCMP, and Mission Public School District are all using AI in different ways.
Both Mission RCMP and Mission Memorial Hospital are piloting AI projects, while city and school district staff can use generative AI for various tasks, so long as that use is acknowledged.
At the school district level, MPSD superintendent Angus Wilson said it also has impacts on learning and teaching. Preparing students to enter the workforce also means making them aware of AI’s potential impact on certain careers.
“You can’t put your head in the sand and say it doesn’t exist right now,” Wilson said.
Kevin Leyton-Brown, UBC computer science professor and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research AI Chair, said Mission’s institutions are doing “a bunch of good stuff” overall to step into the modern era.
“Asking about using AI is sort of like asking about using computers. It depends on how you use it and what you use it for,” Leyton-Brown said.
Leyton-Brown said tools are getting better, especially for research. He said disclosure of AI use is a good idea, but wondered how meaningful it will be if used too often.
“If they use it all the time, you might get a boilerplate on absolutely everything they do … it might be sort of like ‘this bag of chips was made in a facility that processes nuts’ – you just get on absolutely everything and it doesn’t really tell you anything,” he said.
No system will be perfect, but Leyton-Brown said not using a system can also lead to mistakes.
“I think particularly one should be worried that these mistakes don’t necessarily happen uniformly at random. They tend to happen, particularly around situations that are underrepresented in the training data. So whatever it’s seen a lot of, it’s going to do better than what it’s seen less of,” he said.
Discharge planning, patient summaries at Mission Memorial Hospital
Fraser Health said it’s in the early stages of using AI in its organization.
Dimple Prakash, the interim executive director for Fraser Health’s Centre for Advanced Analytics, Data Science and Innovation (CAADSI), said in a statement that AI helps streamline operations and reduce administrative tasks.
“Across all sectors and industries, organizations are investing in AI solutions as key catalysts for change, including here at Fraser Health,” Prakash said.
Prakash said AI projects are designed to assist care providers, not replace them.
“Clinical decisions remain the responsibility of trained professionals, who are accountable to their regulatory and professional practice standards. These tools provide timely data and insights that support, but do not substitute, human judgment in the delivery of care,” she said.
Mission Memorial Hospital site director Dr. Paul Theron said in an interview from 2025 that AI pilot projects were being used at the hospital.
“Being a small site, it’s often easier to look at piloting some initial projects here to see if it’s scalable to the bigger sites as well,” he said.
According to Fraser Health, Mission Memorial Hospital currently uses “AI-enabled solutions” for predictive discharge planning and a hospital course summary which automatically creates a comprehensive narrative of a patient’s hospital stay to be included in their discharge summary and reviewed by their clinician.
Other “AI solutions” in their early stages at Fraser Health include early warning systems that provide data to help identify patients at risk of deterioration, such as those with urinary tract infections, delirium, pneumonia or sepsis.
“These systems help care teams intervene earlier when patients are at risk of deterioration and improve care outcomes,” Fraser Health said.
Another initiative is an AI-powered scheduling tool that forecasts waves in demand in emergency and medicine departments through analyzing patient data.
“These tools help leadership proactively plan staffing by generating baseline schedules and multiple scenarios based on forecasted patient volumes and staffing guidelines,” they said.
Prakash said AI allows care providers to spend more time with patients and focus on delivering quality care.
He added that all AI initiatives at Fraser Health undergo assessments to identify needs and gaps in partnership with clinical, physician and operational leaders.
“They are trialed and piloted before implementation and, once deployed, are subject to continuous monitoring and evaluation to ensure they deliver intended clinical and operational value and return on investment. Solutions are refined, pivoted or discontinued if they do not benefit providers and patients as expected,” Prakash said.
Transcription tool for body-worn camera data
The Mission RCMP detachment is also participating in an AI-pilot.
In November 2024, the detachment became the first in the province to begin using body-worn cameras.
According to a statement from E Division, a new pilot project is assessing the use of AI-based transcription tools within the body-worn camera program.
“All AI-generated video transcripts continue to require officer review and correction, and as the project remains in its early stages, we are still evaluating its viability, accuracy, and potential privacy implications before sharing further details,” E-Division said.
Insp. Ted Lewko, the detachment’s officer-in-charge, said earlier this year the Mission RCMP integrated artificial intelligence software to help officers save time with report writing by using audio and video from the body-worn cameras, along with information from the dispatch system.
“This is helping our officers to get back on the road sooner and respond to calls for service faster,” Lewko said.
Technical content turned into plain language
Staff at the City of Mission are currently using the GovAI tool to help with writing, brainstorming, and content drafting. According to a statement from the city, staff have used it to help revise technical content into plain language.
The city was introduced to the GovAI platform in 2024 at the MISA Canada Executive Summit. Per the statement, citizen data protection is a top priority and the platform allows staff to use AI without the risk of feeding sensitive data into the public domain.
“GovAI is a pioneering vendor solution designed to protect citizen data. It utilizes “shield” technology to detect and redact any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Protected Personal Information (PPI) before it enters the Large Language Model (LLM), preventing that data from being used in prompts or for machine learning,” the city said.
Mission’s Workplace Artificial Intelligence Policy recognizes AI as a tool for advancing innovation and progress, enhancing workflows, streamlining operations, and improving customer experiences.
However, it also noted potential legal, business, and reputational risks associated with using AI.
The policy provides guidelines for city staff for confidentiality, data security, accuracy and transparency. It asks employees to be aware of hidden discrimination embedded in generative AI data and to label content produced by AI.
Altering how teachers instruct students
Superintendent Wilson said AI use in the school district is developing and ongoing. He said it has impacted teaching in the same way that calculators did.
“The reality is that at this given moment, the AI isn’t incredible for doing anything too intellectually deep in the academic sphere. And I think a lot of the work we’re seeing with it is on the kind of operational side of things. And even then, I would emphasize it’s not used very much,” Wilson said.
Students and staff are required to acknowledge when they use AI. He said some teachers use it to develop lesson plans but the work required to ensure it fulfills the curriculum is often more than it would be without AI.
“You have to vet it to make sure that it fulfills the requirements of the curriculum – that it’s appropriate for the age level. And that’s often more work than just doing the lesson plan yourself,” Wilson said.
AI has also altered how teachers are instructing students and handling assignments. Limited access to phones (and AI) in class forces students to develop skills like writing in the classroom rather than at home.
“If students get overly reliant on AI, just like a calculator, it’s causing them challenges later on,” he said.
Chat GPT and Microsoft Copilot is used at the district level “fairly regularly” to aid in policy work, but AI content makes up a small percentage of the finished products.
“We’ve been in quite a heavy policy development phase for the last year, so it’s actually being used a fair amount. I would say that almost every policy that we’ve reviewed in the last year has had a consideration of putting it through AI,” Wilson said.
When undertaking policy work before AI, school district staff would examine similar policies in other districts and look at aspects that could work or be tweaked for Mission.
“That’s the same thing we’re asking of Copilot or whatever is to generate a policy so we can compare it against ours or other ones that exist … we often find that the AI-generated ones are quite lengthy and they really need to be trimmed back. They can get quite wordy and that’s not necessarily useful for us, but it’s still granting that additional perspective and maybe you glean an idea or two out of it,” Wilson said.
Wilson doesn’t anticipate AI use at the district level would lead to the reduction of staff.
“It just doesn’t seem realistic. In fact, I actually see it as dangerous because AI absolutely lacks common sense and human insight,” he said.
Ethical concerns also arise with the appropriation of information without permissions, especially concerning cultural information from Indigenous peoples.
“In essence, it’s stealing from everybody to give you the information you need without crediting it. And that’s a further consideration, especially with our commitments to Indigenous communities,” Wilson said.
Greater Vancouver a ‘hotbed’ for AI expertise
Leyton-Brown said what’s happening in Mission is likely representative of the wider Lower Mainland. He said the Greater Vancouver area is surprisingly a hotbed of AI expertise in the world.
He said AI systems are more like the evolution of Google than they are like people.
“The main misconception is that people just personify AI. They think that AI agents have beliefs and desires and go out and act and they’re sort of like people. Anything that uses language starts just feeling like a person to us,” he said.
Leyton-Brown later added: “It also doesn’t help that the big AI companies have enormous stock market valuations and they have an interest in selling narratives about how they’re going to absolutely transform everything, because that’s the only way they can justify the valuations that they have. So I think there’s just so much hype in the space, and I think I think we should take it, at least at this point, with a grain of salt.”