OTTAWA - Experts in artificial intelligence say it's risky for the Canada Revenue Agency to turn to artificial intelligence to help Canadians with their tax problems when human call centre employees have shown to struggle providing accurate information.

On Tuesday, federal auditor general Karen Hogan issued a damning report which found not only was the CRA answering very few of the calls coming in, when it did pick up the phone, an accurate response was provided by a live agent to fewer than one in five callers about personal income taxes.

Hogan found that Charlie, a rule-based artificial intelligence chatbot, offered correct information about one-third of time.

Unlike generative AI which generates new content based on questions asked, Charlie provides answers from pre-determined script

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