About
The Water CoPilot is an AI assistant that enables instantaneous, science-based insights for decision-making in the Limpopo River Basin.
The AI assistant was developed by IWMI in collaboration with Microsoft, adopting cutting-edge tools to meet the real-world needs of water managers. It will be delivered as a mobile app with real-time capabilities and streamlined development processes.
Capacity building is built into deployment, training end-users on prompt design, ethics, and accountability in AI use.
How it works
Through a simple, natural language interface, users can ask questions about the current or forecasted status of water resources and receive clear, actionable answers — supported by automatically generated maps, charts, and data visualizations. This makes advanced modelling and monitoring capabilities accessible to decision-makers, planners and community stakeholders without requiring specialist technical skills.
- The AI assistant consists of a web interface for user interaction, and the CoPilot agent
- The CoPilot agent is built on a pre-trained GPT-4 large language model , enhanced with validated plugins that act as secure data access points.
- Plugins connect directly to the Digital Twin’s APIs and external knowledge sources (including external plugins such as Microsoft Azure AI Search to index documents.)
- When a user submits a query, the agent reviews the descriptions of available plugins, selects the appropriate one(s), executes the call and returns a fact-based summary with visual outputs.
Next steps
The plugin-based architecture of the CoPilot ensures modularity, new tools can be added rapidly and minimizes hallucinations by restricting the AI to authoritative, real-time datasets.
Looking ahead, IWMI envisions scaling the AI-driven approach across regions, such as Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and South Asia, creating a single, adaptable platform for data-driven water governance worldwide.