The variety of tasks we face as child welfare professionals make our work interesting and challenging and provide many opportunities for AI-led enhancements. Whether we are managing complex cases, communicating effectively with different stakeholders or ensuring that every decision is informed by the best possible data, there are AI tools that can make these tasks more effective and enjoyable. This list highlights a few of the best AI tools available today, categorized by their primary uses. While some require a fee, most of these have free versions that provide many useful features and functions.
General Purpose Chatbots
Microsoft Copilot: copilot.microsoft.com
• Advantages: Seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office products to assist with tasks like drafting emails, creating presentations, and analyzing data.
• Company: Microsoft
• Applications to Child Welfare: Summarize case data and reports; analyze child welfare data trends and source ideas; generate images and tables for reports.
ChatGPT: chatgpt.com
• Advantages: Versatile and adaptive with vivid expressiveness; provides conversational support, generates ideas, and answers questions effectively.
• Company: OpenAI
• Applications to Child Welfare: Create summaries of reports; source ideas for approaches in care or management.
Perplexity: perplexity.ai
• Advantages: Designed primarily as a research and search assistant, it excels in providing accurate, up-to-date information with source citations.
• Company: Perplexity
• Applications to Child Welfare: Provide quick access to research findings and data that can inform decisions about child welfare trends, research efforts, and programs.
Claude Sonnet: anthropic.com/claude
• Advantages: Simplifies large-scale content analysis and offers creative support in drafting reports and proposals with a thoughtful, organized and structured tone.
• Company: Anthropic
• Applications to Child Welfare: Support strategic planning and policy development in a more academic style with rapid content generation and summarization.
Other AI Tools for Specific Uses
OpenAI Canvas: openai.com/index/introducing-canvas
• Advantages: Allows for seamless document creation, editing, and collaborative brainstorming.
• Company: OpenAI
• Applications to Child Welfare: Facilitate report generation, policy drafting, and collaboration.
Fireflies: fireflies.ai
• Advantages: Provides efficient transcription, highlights, and meeting summaries.
• Company: Fireflies
• Applications to Child Welfare: Reduce the administrative burden of meeting documentation for caseworkers.
Google NotebookLM: notebooklm.google.com
• Advantages: Designed for deep learning and interactive research support, providing contextualized notes from various resources.
• Company: Google
• Applications to Child Welfare: Help professionals synthesize complex information, making it easier to track case histories and develop informed intervention strategies.
Plaud: plaud.ai
• Advantages: Combines transcription and analysis into one device and web service; supports 40 languages.
• Company: Plaud
• Applications to Child Welfare: Facilitate multilingual communication and record-keeping for diverse child welfare populations.
Time and precision are as crucial in child welfare as they are in many other fields. The AI tools highlighted here provide powerful solutions to help improve time and precision for many of our challenges. By experimenting safely with the tools in the list above (and remembering never to use PII or PHI) we can become more effective while focusing our efforts on improving outcomes for the children and families we serve. The more we practice using these tools, the better our agencies will be equipped to handle the demands of our work within a rapidly evolving technological environment.