Digital Agency Starts Trial of a Gennai AI App That Helps 180,000 Officials Draft Diet Answers
Japan’s Digital Agency on October 30 began offering a prototype AI app that helps government staff prepare answers to questions in the Diet, making it available to about 180,000 officials through Gennai, the government’s generative AI platform, according to the agency’s announcement and reports by NTV News and Nikkei xTECH.
Drafting Diet answers is one of the most demanding jobs in Kasumigaseki. Once a lawmaker gives notice of a question, officials have a short window to work out what is being asked, search past answers, laws and background documents, and write a reply that is accurate and consistent with earlier government positions. The agency says routine searching, sorting and checking of wording eats up much of that time, leaving less room to think through the substance of the answer.
The new app organises the intent of a question, searches past answers and supporting materials, generates a draft answer and helps check its content. During development, 102 experienced officials recruited from 16 ministries and agencies tested the screens and functions, and some of their suggestions have already been built in. The prototype is being trialled during the current extraordinary session, the 222nd Diet, with full rollout planned for the ordinary session that opens in January.
What it means in practice
The agency is explicit that the tool does not replace human judgement. It warns that generative AI can produce plausible but false or unsupported content, so staff must check every draft against source documents, confirm consistency with past answers and government policy, and review the wording. Policy decisions and the final text remain the responsibility of officials and their bureaus, and ministers deliver the answers. The app builds on the agency’s earlier move to open AI agents in Gennai to 180,000 government staff under safety rules, and echoes local projects such as Fukui Prefecture, which gave 5,400 staff a minutes-taking AI and saved 434 hours.
Long nights spent preparing Diet answers have been a familiar strain on civil servants, and the Yomiuri Shimbun framed the app as part of an effort to cut long working hours. The real test is whether the drafts save time once the human checking is counted.
What to watch next is what the trial reveals about output quality and time saved, which changes are made before January, and whether ministries set rules on recording when AI helped prepare an answer.