Recently I was asked to testify before the House Administration Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation at a hearing entitled “The Future of Constituent Engagement with Congress.” Republican and Democratic Members posed a blunt, practical question: How can legislators use AI to better engage the public?

Republican and Democratic Members of the House Administration Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation posed a blunt, practical question: How can legislators use AI to better engage the public?

They understood that collective intelligence can improve how institutions like Congress gather information and make decisions. They were genuinely curious about how to engage the public effectively and efficiently at scale.

But they lack practical know-how. When should a government run a town hall or deliberative dialogue? When should it open a comment period? When does a design competition or hackathon make sense? How should officials choose platforms, structure participation, and connect public input to real decisions?

Across every branch, citizen engagement remains the exception rather than the rule, even though tapping the intelligence and expertise of our communities could help institutions solve problems more effectively and legitimately.

Artificial intelligence could reduce the time, cost, and complexity of participation. AI tools can translate materials into plain language, organize large volumes of input, identify patterns across contributions, and generate clear feedback to participants. With the help of AI, the Brazilian Senate is experimenting with tools to sort and organize public comments submitted to committees. Bogotá uses an AI chatbot to enable tens of thousands of residents to participate in participatory budgeting. Vienna’s Climate Team and Hamburg’s urban planning agency use AI to categorize residents' proposals, allowing staff to review them more efficiently.

At the same time, AI raises important questions about legitimacy and accountability in public participation. After the hearing, the Subcommittee sent follow-up questions, including: “How can Congress ensure that AI tools used for engagement preserve nuance and diversity of opinion, rather than flattening or oversimplifying constituent input?”

Without knowing answers to these kinds of questions, public officials at every level of government either avoid engagement because it feels too costly and complex, or they launch a platform, collect thousands of comments, and then nothing happens. Little wonder that three out of four residents across 24 countries say elected officials do not care what people like them think.

Three out of four residents across 24 countries say elected officials do not care what people like them think.

Across every branch, citizen engagement remains the exception rather than the rule, even though tapping the intelligence and expertise of our communities could help institutions solve problems more effectively and legitimately.

To help address this gap, InnovateUS, The GovLab, and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard University are creating a free online course called Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era. The course is designed to help public professionals plan and run public engagement processes that produce meaningful outcomes.

To help address this gap, InnovateUS, The GovLab, and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard University are creating a free online course called Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era. The course is designed to help public professionals plan and run public engagement processes that produce meaningful outcomes.

The at-your-own-pace series of videos will introduce a framework for engagement, from defining goals and identifying participants to designing outreach, structuring participant tasks, building workflows from input to impact, evaluating contributions fairly, and communicating results to communities. Each module will show how to use AI to improve each of these steps.

This course is a participatory and collaborative effort. 

• First, the course is based on the learnings from a dozen workshops InnovateUS ran with engagement leaders this fall. 

• Second, we are co-creating the curriculum and scripts with an advisory committee of more than 50 global experts from two dozen countries. 

• Third, we will develop the program alongside public sector partners who are working to institutionalize engagement in their own governments and who can promote the uptake of greater learning about how to “do democracy.”

We invite you to help shape this effort. You can review the draft curriculum outline here.

We welcome comments directly

We welcome comments directly on the document or by email at [email protected]. In particular, we are interested in:

• examples of AI-enabled engagement in practice
  

• risks or tensions we should address more explicitly
  

• practitioner stories that illustrate what works and what does not
  

• suggestions for tools, methods, or cases to include.

Our goal is to build a practical resource for people doing the daily work of governance under real constraints. Working with InnovateUS government partners, we will make this course freely available to public servants and the public globally and increase the rate at which institutions engage their constituents in shaping policies and programs.

Working with InnovateUS government partners, we aim to make this course available to public servants globally and increase the rate at which institutions engage their constituents in shaping policies and programs.

When institutions develop the capacity to design engagement well, participation strengthens democratic legitimacy and policy effectiveness. AI can help make engagement easier to run and easier to scale, but only institutions can make engagement consequential.

The technology exists to support that kind of engagement. What institutions need now is the capacity to design and run it well.

To receive updates about the course and the accompanying AI and engagement coaching tool, sign up here.