InnovateUS 
Each week, we're spotlighting how public servants are putting the ideas from our new course, Designing Democratic Engagement with AI, into practice.
Every spotlight pairs a short video clip with a concrete example: one practitioner, one project, one design choice made real.
Together, the series moves module by module through the course, showing what defining goals, choosing methods, or using AI responsibly actually looks like on the ground.
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[Ben Peterson] In Warren County, Kentucky, we launched an initiative called What Could BG Be? to engage residents in shaping our community’s vision for the next 25 years.
We asked a simple question: “What do you want to see in Bowling Green’s future?”
From the start, we were clear about our goal: we wanted to understand residents’ priorities for the future and identify where people agreed and disagreed. So we asked a simple question: “What do you want to see in Bowling Green’s future?”
We conducted an extensive outreach campaign using word of mouth, print, and digital media. To manage participation at scale, we used AI-supported tools. Pol.is helped us facilitate deliberation and identify consensus, and Google Jigsaw’s Sensemaking tool helped synthesize answers into digestible categories of agreement.
We were explicit with participants that AI was helping us manage volume while preserving the meaning of what they said.
We heard from nearly 8,000 people, who contributed almost 4,000 ideas and over one million responses. Those inputs are now informing BG2050, our new 25-year comprehensive plan, and other public policy and private partner initiatives.
Just as important, the process helped people better understand one another. Most participants told us they came away with a clearer sense of different viewpoints, and we were able to surface areas of broad agreement that had not been visible before.
By defining our goals clearly from the outset, we were able to gain confidence that we were having the right conversations to turn participation into actionable insights,
By defining our goals clearly from the outset—for both the engagement and the role of AI—we were able to gain confidence that we were having the right conversations to turn participation into actionable insights, which then built trust and a shared understanding.