Reprinted from Thursday, May 14, 2026, The Times (Scottish Edition), page 20.

When headlines talk about AI, they feature money and fear. Which companies will dominate? Which jobs will disappear? Will AI destroy us?

Missing from the conversation is a more interesting possibility — that we could use AI to help democracies work better.

Governments collect more public input than ever — consultations, service requests, surveys, social media — but most of it goes unread. A council may receive 10,000 responses to a planning consultation and lack the capacity to make sense of them. When citizens participate and nothing changes, trust erodes. Across thirty OECD countries, 44 per cent of people report low or no trust in their national government.

We can use AI to fix the overload that ails our institutions and, at the same time, make them more responsive. In Camden, for example, the council launched Britain’s largest trial in participatory democracy, using AI-powered tools to help residents shape the future of adult social care. The technology lets institutions listen at the scale that people are demanding to be heard.

Camden is a working example of AI designed to help governments get smarter from the collective wisdom of the communities they serve. But it remains an exception, because we have yet to approach the challenges of democracy as a solvable problem.

Scotland has a record of democratic innovation few countries can match — participatory budgeting embedded in local government, pioneering experiments in public deliberation, and, recently, a stakeholder exchange at the University of Edinburgh’s Futures Institute (EFI) exploring how data and AI should be governed.

The university is home to more than 60 years of AI research and the UK’s national supercomputer. The question is whether anyone will put those things together, building AI that makes democratic participation work at scale, not just in one-off experiments.

Britain should establish a dedicated research programme for democratic AI, backed by public funding, tasked with building the tools that councils, health authorities, and planning departments actually need. Not another advisory board, not another white paper, but a funded, long-term commitment. Every council, health authority, and planning department faces the same problem — more demand, fewer staff, bigger problems.

Democratic AI is how we solve them — and the country that builds these tools first will export them to every democracy that needs them.

Learn more about Beth's forthcoming book, "Reboot: AI and the Race to save Democracy" at https://rebootdemocracy.ai/book