Insights on AI governance, public sector innovation, and democracy
In a New York Times guest essay, Beth Simone Noveck makes the case for putting A.I. behind every public servant. She draws on examples from New Jersey, California, the U.K., South Korea and South Australia, and calls for three investments: training the public workforce, giving workers secure access to multiple models, and using government purchasing power to build open, accountable A.I.
After the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, California's Office of Data and Innovation used Engaged California to gather more than 1,300 resident comments. AI helped turn that input into 19 policy options, which residents then deliberated over and ranked. Jeffery Marino explains how clear ownership, with state agencies, local governments, and community groups acting together with support from the Governor's office, turned those priorities into a five-part recovery action plan.
A new free course from the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, The GovLab, and InnovateUS teaches public servants how to design AI-enabled public engagement that turns comments into policy, drawing on 42 real-world examples from 20 countries.
The public conversation about AI has swung from exuberance to alarm, casting AI as an unstoppable force. That framing overlooks the fact that public institutions design, build, buy, and regulate AI, and societies still choose where it leads. This fall, Reboot is organizing its coverage around four connected questions: what capabilities public institutions need, how they can become institutions that listen and learn, what public AI infrastructure requires, and how we measure whether AI is actually creating public value.
A Boston Globe editorial argues that Massachusetts should use AI to identify outdated laws, unnecessary reporting requirements, and inefficient regulations, drawing on reforms and pilot programs in other states. Featuring insights from Beth Simone Noveck and Stanford RegLab, it explains how AI-assisted review, paired with human judgment, could reduce administrative burdens and improve government efficiency.
AI presents real risks, but disengagement leaves its future to others. Drawing on principles of negotiation, mediation, and decision-making, this essay by John Lande, Isidor Loeb Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law, argues that democratic societies should approach AI as they would any difficult dispute: by carefully weighing risks and opportunities, exercising sound judgment under conditions of uncertainty, and participating in the decisions that will shape its future. This blog is adapted from a University of Missouri School of Law Legal Studies SSRN paper.
At 92NY’s State of America Summit, Beth Simone Noveck, Betsey Stevenson, and Allison Pugh discuss AI, the future of American labor, and whether technology will strengthen public voice or erode human connection.
Ted Dintersmith and Beth Simone Noveck argue that America’s high school math curriculum remains rooted in the needs of the 19th century rather than the AI era. They call for replacing an emphasis on rote procedures with quantitative reasoning, statistics, probability, and decision-making skills that people actually use. The authors propose using AI to engage thousands of students, educators, parents, and employers in redesigning math education through large-scale, democratic public participation.
The debate about AI has focused on misinformation and AI slop, but those are only part of the story. As AI creates both unprecedented information abundance and information compression, we need a new conception of information literacy—one that encompasses how individuals reason, how communities learn together, and how democratic institutions use AI to become better listeners and problem-solvers.
AI adoption in government is accelerating. The next challenge is making sure it creates public value. InnovateUS’s Fall 2026 Live Learning Series explores how public professionals can move beyond using AI to measuring its impact, governing it responsibly, and ensuring it improves outcomes for the people and communities government serves.
This excerpt from Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy was originally published in Fast Company on June 25, 2026.
What happens when the people working closest to families are forced to confront AI? In this conversation with Elana Banin, journalist Anya Kamenetz reflects on a three-day workshop that brought together service providers, advocates, technologists, policymakers, journalists, and philanthropists to wrestle with that question. The discussion explores why families have been largely absent from AI governance debates, how to shape the trajectory of technological change, and what it would take to build AI with communities rather than for them.
Billions of people are about to watch the World Cup. And millions of them will spend part of it furious, not at the teams, but at football's most contentious technology: the Video Assistant Referee. In this article, Anirudh Dinesh argues we are making the same mistake in how we design, build, and use AI, and shares four lessons VAR can teach us about what happens when you build tech without asking who it's actually meant for.
Local government generates enormous amounts of public knowledge, but much of it remains buried in disconnected PDFs and difficult-to-navigate archives. This post explores how the Block Party team used AI, semantic search, and human expertise to build a searchable archive of 17 years of Manhattan Community Board 3 resolutions, making local government decisions, institutional memory, and civic participation more accessible to residents, journalists, and public officials.
As AI transforms how we work, learn, and govern, what role should universities play? In this wide-ranging conversation, Beth Noveck argues that universities should become laboratories for democratic problem-solving, where students work with communities to address public challenges. She outlines a vision for "democratic AI" that puts public purpose, participation, and impact at the center of technological innovation.
InnovateUS