Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

Leaders increasingly believe public engagement matters, but lack the practical know-how to do it well. Beth Simone Noveck and Dane Gambrell examine how institutions use AI and collective intelligence to engage the public at scale. Across countries and levels of government, engagement can move from performative to consequential when institutions build the capacity to design it well. That work now comes together in a new free course, Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era, created by InnovateUS, The GovLab, and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, to help public professionals turn these lessons into practice.

This week on Reboot Democracy, Cassandra Madison argues that governments cannot responsibly adopt new tools without safe, shared spaces to test them before procurement locks in risk. Dhruv Kamlesh Kumar shows how that principle worked in practice on the AIEP project, where families shaped a special education tool by defining what information matters, how privacy is protected, and how meaning is preserved across languages. Beth Simone Noveck reports from Boston, drawing on lessons from Spain to help launch a citizen-enabled permitting overhaul. These efforts stand in contrast to recent failures, from New York City shutting down a misleading chatbot to immigration surveillance systems and exposed children’s chat records that show how weak governance turns tools into harm.

What if the problem with government wasn’t too many rules, but how they’re organized? Boston’s permitting overhaul with AI for Impact shows how AI and collective intelligence can simplify the user experience without eroding the safeguards that matter.