Insights on AI, Governance and Democracy
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.
Families are expected to advocate for their children using IEP documents that are dense, technical, and often inaccessible. Instead of treating AI as a black box that produces generic summaries, this project takes a different approach of "unboxing the prompt" and inviting parents into the system's core logic. This post traces how community feedback reshaped the tool at every stage, from moving beyond one-size-fits-all summaries to extracting legally meaningful details, to designing for privacy, to preserving meaning across languages, and to foregrounding student strengths.
Governments are adopting powerful new technologies faster than their systems are built to learn. This piece by Cassandra Madison at the Center for Civic Futures argues that responsible innovation requires more than access to tools. It requires safe, structured spaces for experimentation. By treating experimentation as public infrastructure, governments can learn early, surface risks before they scale, and make better decisions when the stakes are highest.
Crowdsourced mapping of schools in Uzbekistan and Bhutan combined with AI data analysis created greater insight into on-the-ground conditions. By treating geography as essential, spatial data, participatory collection, and AI analysis reshaped how evidence-informed public investment and policy decisions are made in Uzbekistan and Bhutan.
Organizations are among humanity’s most powerful inventions, but many of the structures we take for granted no longer serve the people inside them or the public they exist to support. Drawing on insights from Christian Bason, this piece by Anita McGahan explores how AI can help public organizations move beyond rigid hierarchies toward more humane, trust-based, and purpose-driven ways of working. The result is a vision of government that listens more effectively, empowers frontline staff, and delivers real value to people and communities.
A hiring tool changes your "personality" score based on whether there's a bookshelf behind you in an interview. A hospital model suggests asthmatics are safer—because it learned how to respond to the triage system, not the disease. This InnovateUS workshop explains why predictive AI needs governance, not just accuracy.
The Observatory of Public Sector AI is a new research initiative of InnovateUS and The GovLab. The Observatory draws on anonymized data from more than 150,000 public servants nationwide. By analyzing how public employees learn, use, and adapt AI at work, the Observatory aims to identify which investments in skills and training strengthen government capacity, improve services, and deliver better outcomes for residents.
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.
In this InnovateUS Amplify workshop, former Member of Congress Brian Baird and former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson share hard-earned lessons on trust, empathy, and why listening may be the most powerful skill public servants have. Drawing on hundreds of town halls and decades of newsroom leadership, they offer practical guidance for winning back public trust.
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.