Insights on AI, Governance and Democracy
India's Bhashini platform is democratizing access to digital services for 1.4 billion people by treating multilingual capability as public infrastructure. Through crowdsourced voice donations and open APIs, this initiative could transform how underserved populations access rights and resources that were previously locked behind language barriers.
This piece examines how the Commonwealth of Virginia is using artificial intelligence to modernize regulatory review, shifting the focus from regulating AI to governing with it. Drawing on recent reforms led by the Virginia Office of Regulatory Management under Governor Glenn Youngkin, the article outlines how AI tools are being applied to analyze regulations, reduce administrative burden, and improve transparency. The "Virginia Model" offers a practical model for other states exploring how AI can strengthen core government functions.
Facing worsening congestion and no room to build new roads, Hillerød, Denmark, turned to its residents for direction. Diverse engagement channels and AI tools helped the city identify priorities politicians hadn’t anticipated.
U.S. labor law is shaped by thousands of decisions issued each year by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the courts, yet much of this precedent remains difficult for workers, organizers, and even lawyers to access in practice. This piece examines how the NLRB’s fragmented document publication system creates real information barriers for workers and their advocates. A new tool, NLRB Research, uses open-source software and AI to make labor law searchable and and usable, demonstrating how improving access to public legal information can help empower workers to understand and act on their rights.
New Jersey’s Office of Innovation has received a Public Benefit Innovation Fund grant to expand its AI platform with tools that help residents access benefits faster and with fewer errors. In this conversation, Beth Simone Noveck and NJ Chief Innovation Officer Dave Cole discuss how document processing, eligibility matching, feedback analysis, and memo-generation tools are already improving programs such as Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, and Summer EBT, and what it takes to deploy AI responsibly within government.
Conventional Wisdom presents mid-sized economies with two options for accessing advanced AI: rely on American or Chinese systems, or fall behind. Neither choice preserves the technological sovereignty that countries increasingly see as essential. But there is a third path we explore in detail in a recent memo. Collectively, nations outside the US-China duopoly possess substantial computing infrastructure, a majority of the world’s top researchers, and the growing political will to create a third path. The question is whether they can come together to make it work.
The City as Mesh by Geoff Mulgan and Caio Werneck offers a powerful new framework for organizing cities to tackle cross-cutting challenges. This Research Radar examines their new paper and argues for going further: using AI as a coordination layer, treating skills as design choices, and leveraging public engagement as operational intelligence.
Governments are increasingly using AI to identify redundant, outdated, and burdensome regulations. But efficiency alone is not reform: without public judgment, simplification can weaken essential protections. The Green Tape Challenge shows how pairing AI with collective intelligence can modernize regulation while preserving legitimacy, equity, and purpose.From Red Tape to Green Tape: Decluttering the State with AI and Collective Intelligence
This Research Radar examines how California’s Office of Data and Innovation used a rigorous, community-driven approach to translate thousands of survivor contributions from the LA wildfires into a concrete recovery action plan. Combining deliberative design, large-scale digital participation, AI-assisted analysis, and human review, the engagement shows how public institutions can listen at scale, synthesize insight with integrity, and move from data to decisions when it matters most.
In this workshop, Audrey Tang and Danielle Allen discuss how AI-enabled civic technologies, paired with radical transparency and thoughtful institutional design, can help democracies respond to problems faster, govern more fairly, and rebuild public trust. Lessons from Taiwan, California, and other contexts show how combining digital tools with in-person engagement can surface common ground and reduce polarization. Together, the speakers argue that democracy can meet today’s challenges when it is designed to be fast, fair, and genuinely engaging for the people it serves.
A House Administration Subcommittee hearing featuring Dr. Beth Simone Noveck, Dr. Michael Neblo, Aubrey Wilson, and Ken Ward examined the future of constituent engagement with Congress. The discussion focused on AI implementation, including: how internal tools can support staff accuracy and accountability; why structured and representative deliberation outperforms open-ended intake; and what lessons Congress can draw from international legislatures that have modernized faster. Together, the takeaways highlight the challenge of rebuilding congressional capacity so that public participation yields insight, not overload.
In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation, Dr. Beth Simone Noveck argues that Congress’s challenge is too little institutional capacity to use public input. With committee staff and in-house expertise sharply reduced and more than 81 million constituent communications each year, traditional engagement has become costly, slow, and often performative. Drawing on examples from the U.S., Brazil, Germany, among others, she shows how pairing disciplined engagement design with AI tools can help Congress synthesize public input, surface expertise, and strengthen lawmaking at scale.
This analysis by OECD.AI contributors offers a clear, practical blueprint for “public AI.” It maps where power concentrates across the AI tech stack, such as compute, data, and models, and shows how governments can intervene without trying to outspend frontier labs. Its distinctive contribution is a gradient approach that makes AI more public through democratic control, public-interest functions, and open components, paired with three concrete pathways to reduce dependence on corporate oversight and build meaningful public alternatives.
Since its creation in 2023, InnovateUS’s training offerings have supported public professionals in making sense of change together, building capacity, and strengthening their ability to make informed decisions in practice. Our Spring 2026 workshop offering, which we’re presenting today, reflects insights from learners, partners, and experts about the challenges facing public service today.