InnovateUS 
AI and Public Engagement
Democracy has a listening problem. These AI tools could actually help
This excerpt from Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy was originally published in Fast Company on June 25, 2026.
Latest from Reboot
View all posts →How technology can help save democracy | The TechTank Podcast
Beth Simone Noveck recently appeared on the Brookings TechTank podcast to discuss her forthcoming book, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy (Yale University Press), arguing that AI offers powerful opportunities to strengthen democratic institutions and making the case for a "possibilist" approach to building tools that make democracy more responsive and effective.
AI and Problem Solving
Civic University – Democracy, AI, and the Public Imagination
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.
Global AI Watch
From digital to AI-enabled government: Kazakhstan's next frontier
Kazakhstan built one of the world’s most advanced digital governments in less than two decades. Now the country is racing into the next phase: AI-enabled governance, sovereign AI infrastructure, and nationwide AI deployment. But this transition is exposing a harder question beneath the ambition: what happens when countries move toward frontier AI systems before large parts of the population have reliable electricity, affordable internet, laptops, or the skills needed to use AI meaningfully?
Research Radar
Research Radar: The Six-Word Problem: Will Voice Improve How We Research the Impacts of AI?
AI for Impact Fellows Sai Punith Kolla and Swaapnika Chowdary Cherukuru built Public Voice, a lightweight voice-based feedback tool designed to capture concrete examples of how learners apply AI in practice. The piece explores the design challenge behind the tool, why voice responses may produce richer evidence than text surveys, and what it means to measure whether public-sector AI training is translating into real workflow change.
Research Radar
Zero-Click Government: Omakase or Loss of Agency?
In the afterword to Gustavo Maia’s forthcoming book Zero-Click Government, Beth Simone Noveck explores the democratic risks and possibilities of anticipatory governance. While supporting efforts to reduce the administrative burdens placed on citizens, she argues that traditional requests and applications also served as an important democratic feedback signal, one that anticipatory systems risk losing when governments act on inferred demand. Her response examines what kinds of participation, transparency, contestation, and institutional learning are needed if public action is increasingly shaped by data and AI.
Global AI Watch
Progress on Global AI Governance: The CAIDP AI Index and Implications for the Public Sector
The 2026 CAIDP AI Index, ranking AI policy commitments across 90 countries, shows that while most governments now agree on core governance principles, the real divide lies in implementation. Many are advancing laws, oversight, and public participation, but progress lags in turning commitments into practice. As the baseline shifts from whether to govern AI to how, the report underscores that outcomes depend less on frameworks and more on the capacity of public institutions—and the civil servants within them—to operationalize these principles in everyday decisions.
Rethinking Regulation
Rethinking Regulation: How Virginia Used AI to Streamline Its Regulatory Code
A new entry in our Rethinking Regulation series, this in-depth case study by Dane Gambrell includes an interview with Reeve Bull, who led the state’s regulatory modernization effort. It traces how Virginia used AI to review decades of accumulated rules, cut regulatory requirements by over a third, and make them clearer and more accessible. It shows how governments can pair strong institutional processes with AI to modernize regulation and improve how it works for the public.
AI for Governance
Before you engage, listen: a framework for citizen participation across the policy cycle
A mayor presents a plan, residents push back, and everyone leaves frustrated, not because people weren’t heard, but because listening and engagement happened at the wrong moment. This piece reframes participation as a cycle: listening to set the agenda, engagement to shape decisions, and follow-through to prove input mattered. The example of St. Louis shows how sequencing these stages turns public input into real outcomes, with AI enabling reflection on input at scale.
Global AI Watch
A Dozen Interns on Cocaine: What One of the Longest-Running Civic Tech Projects Reveals About AI in Government
What happens when governments rely on systems that sound right instead of being right? Drawing on OpenFisca’s spread from France to governments across Europe, Africa, and Oceania, Beth Simone Noveck’s interview with Matti Schneider makes the case for public infrastructure that computes the law, as well as the risks of sidelining it as generative AI scales globally.
AI for Governance
What AI Governance Documents Actually Cover and What They Don’t
AI governance is expanding fast, but not evenly. A new analysis from MIT and Georgetown’s CSET maps over 1,000 governance documents to show that while policies are proliferating, they cluster around familiar risks and sectors, leaving key gaps across socioeconomic impacts, upstream design, and everyday domains. The result, as relayed by research member Yan Zhu, is a more precise picture of what AI governance actually covers, what it still overlooks, and where policymakers should focus in the future.
AI for Impact
What Good AI In Government Actually Looks Like
More than $1 trillion in federal grants flows to communities each year, but complexity keeps much of it out of reach. This piece by Beth Simone Noveck, published by Fast Company, explores how AI can either deepen that gap or help close it. The solution is GrantWell, a community-centered tool designed with local governments to make funding accessible and public systems work as intended. Launched in Massachusetts and expanding to additional states, it shows how AI can help communities claim the resources already set aside for them.
Global AI Watch
Designing Democratic Engagement in the AI Era: Three Hard Choices
Designing a one-hour course on democratic engagement and AI means confronting genuinely hard questions about representativeness, political framing, and audience, where thoughtful experts disagree, and every choice involves a real tradeoff. Over the past week, we drafted, debated, and cut more than 25,000 words to a working script, informed by over 300 comments from 50 advisors across 24 countries and a room full of democratic theorists in Barcelona. This post explains the three hardest calls we had to make and why we made them.
AI for Governance
The AI Agents are Here: A Technical Blueprint for Governments
AI agents are reshaping how systems operate across sectors. This piece argues that the imminent challenge to address is autonomy, including how agents act, interact, and scale in open environments. It outlines a three-part blueprint for governments to build trust infrastructure, prepare for multi-agent risks, and develop the institutional capacity needed to govern an increasingly agentic world.
Global AI Watch
From Access to Opportunity: How Governments Can Build Inclusive AI
Growing up in Kakuma refugee camp, Nhial Deng experienced what it means to be excluded from opportunities. Returning years later, he saw young people using AI not as aid, but as a tool to build skills, income, and futures in real time. This piece argues that AI is already functioning as an economic opportunity layer, but one that remains uneven and fragile without intentional design. Drawing on examples from Canada, Singapore, and Kenya, Deng outlines how governments can move from accidental access to structured opportunity by connecting AI to jobs, embedding it in trusted institutions, and building safeguards alongside deployment.
AI for Impact
Healey-Driscoll Administration Launches GrantWell, a First-of-its-Kind AI-Powered Tool to Assist Communities with Applying for Grants
The Healey-Driscoll Administration has launched GrantWell, a free AI-powered tool developed with Northeastern University’s Burnes Center for Social Change to help municipalities more easily access and apply for federal and state funding. GrantWell helps you summarize complex grant requirements, identify opportunities, and draft early-stage proposals, reducing administrative burden and expanding capacity to secure resources
Global AI Watch
South Australia needs its own sovereign AI capability
In this commentary, originally published by InDaily South Australia, Matt Ryan argues that artificial intelligence can help governments deliver more effective, human-centered services, but only if it builds public trust and democratic legitimacy. Drawing on examples from Spain, San Francisco, and the UK, he outlines a path for South Australia to develop “sovereign AI capability.” His proposal focuses on three priorities: participatory AI governance, stronger public-sector AI skills, and reinvesting efficiency gains into public services, ensuring AI improves government while strengthening democracy.
Research Radar
Assembly Required: A Conversation with Lorelei Kelly on Deliberative Technology and Congressional Reform
In this conversation with Elana Banin, Lorelei Kelly argues that rebuilding democratic resilience requires redesigning the institutional infrastructure connecting citizens to Congress. Drawing on constitutional history and emerging technologies, she explores how deliberative technology and AI could help revive the First Amendment’s promises of assembly and petition for the digital age.
Governing AI
Who Will Shape AI in the Public Interest
The current controversy over the Pentagon’s AI contracts reveals a deeper issue: governments are shaping the AI market through procurement in the wrong ways or not at all, failing to make demands that AI strengthen democracy and improve governance. As AI becomes core public infrastructure, public institutions must use their purchasing power deliberately by requiring portability, accountability, and interoperability and prioritizing use in the public interest. This post explains the public conversation we are having about public and democratic AI andhow governments can buy, build, and govern AI on the public’s terms.
AI for Impact
How We Co-Designed an AI-Powered Tool for IEPs with Families in San Francisco
As the AIEP project concludes its first pilot in San Francisco, it offers more than a new AI tool for navigating IEPs. It shows what becomes possible when families, educators, designers, and researchers co-design technology from the ground up. Through a free, open-source tool, a civic AI learning course, a community-centered playbook, and academic research, this work demonstrates a practical model for public-purpose AI rooted in lived experience, shared learning, and accountability. What began as support for parents has grown into a blueprint for building AI with communities, not just for them.
AI for Impact
Wicked Decluttering
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.
AI for Impact
Research Radar: “Unboxing the Prompt”: How Community Feedback (and AI) Helped Us Build Better AI Together
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.
Global AI Watch
Global Watch: Hillerød, Denmark is crowdsourcing its way through a traffic jam
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.
AI for Governance
Using AI to Improve Public Services in New Jersey: An interview with Dave Cole
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.
Global AI Watch
Can mid-sized economies come together to build frontier AI?
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.
Rethinking Regulation
From Red Tape to Green Tape: Decluttering the State with AI and Collective Intelligence
Governments are increasingly using AI to identify redundant, outdated, and burdensome regulations. But efficiency alone is not reform: without public judgment, simplification can weaken essential protections. The Green Tape Challenge shows how pairing AI with collective intelligence can modernize regulation while preserving legitimacy, equity, and purpose.From Red Tape to Green Tape: Decluttering the State with AI and Collective Intelligence
AI and Lawmaking
Using AI to Support Public Deliberation: A Conversation with Audrey Tang
In this InnovateUS workshop, Audrey Tang and Danielle Allen discuss how AI-enabled civic technologies, paired with radical transparency and thoughtful institutional design, can help democracies respond to problems faster, govern more fairly, and rebuild public trust. Lessons from Taiwan, California, and other contexts show how combining digital tools with in-person engagement can surface common ground and reduce polarization. Together, the speakers argue that democracy can meet today’s challenges when it is designed to be fast, fair, and genuinely engaging for the people it serves.
AI and Lawmaking
The Future of Constituent Engagement with Congress
In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation, Dr. Beth Simone Noveck argues that Congress’s challenge is too little institutional capacity to use public input. With committee staff and in-house expertise sharply reduced and more than 81 million constituent communications each year, traditional engagement has become costly, slow, and often performative. Drawing on examples from the U.S., Brazil, Germany, among others, she shows how pairing disciplined engagement design with AI tools can help Congress synthesize public input, surface expertise, and strengthen lawmaking at scale.
Research Radar
Public AI: Policies for democratic and sustainable AI infrastructures
This analysis by OECD.AI contributors offers a clear, practical blueprint for “public AI.” It maps where power concentrates across the AI tech stack, such as compute, data, and models, and shows how governments can intervene without trying to outspend frontier labs. Its distinctive contribution is a gradient approach that makes AI more public through democratic control, public-interest functions, and open components, paired with three concrete pathways to reduce dependence on corporate oversight and build meaningful public alternatives.
Research Radar: The White House Wants a Scientific Genesis. It May Trigger a Democratic Exodus
The Trump Administration’s Genesis Mission aims to unify federal supercomputers, datasets, and AI systems into a single national platform for scientific discovery. But as Beth Simone Noveck argues, the plan centralizes unprecedented research power while offering almost no role for universities, communities, or the public, raising urgent questions about access, transparency, and democratic accountability.
AI and Problem Solving
Solving Public Problems with Artificial Intelligence
The Solving Public Problems course has helped learners worldwide tackle complex challenges. The course teaches how to leverage technology, data, and collective wisdom in our communities to design powerful solutions to contemporary problems. Now, Beth Simone Noveck is exploring how to remake it for the AI era, using technology to make problem-solving skills easier to learn without losing the human connection at its core. Your input is needed!
AI for Governance
Global AI Watch: Brazil’s Experiment in AI-Powered Participation
When Brazil's federal government launched its 2023 Participatory Pluriannual Plan, the response was massive: 1.4 million participants submitted over 8,200 proposals through the Brasil Participativo platform. But volume creates a challenge, as manually processing thousands of contributions is slow and resource-intensive, often causing valuable insights to slip through the cracks. Now, Brazil is pioneering an open-source AI system that automatically analyzes citizen feedback, generates comprehensive reports, and tracks which suggestions made it into final policies. The result is a new model for democratic intelligence, one that transforms the flood of public input into structured, actionable knowledge without losing the nuance of individual voices.
Governing AI
Governing the Undefined: Why the Debate Over Superintelligence Misses the Point
As headlines warn of “superintelligent AI” threatening human extinction, a new open letter reignites familiar fears. But beneath the apocalyptic rhetoric lies a deeper problem. The narrative around artificial superintelligence, long embraced by Big Tech, diverts attention from the real and immediate challenges of AI and how our democratic institutions can address them.
Re-thinking AI: How a Group of Civic Technologists Discovered the Power of AI to Rebuild Trust in Government
After two years of research, the RethinkAI collaborative released Making AI Work for the Public—a comprehensive field review of how U.S. governments adopt AI. Since 2019, over 1,600 AI-related bills have been introduced, but most focus on guardrails, not proactive strategy. Meanwhile, cities are piloting translation tools, engagement platforms, and predictive systems, often led by Chief Information Officers, taking on new strategic roles. The report challenges civic tech’s efficiency-first legacy and proposes a new governance model—ALT: Adapt to anticipate needs, Listen to understand communities, and build Trust through two-way accountability.
AI and Public Engagement
How Hamburg is Turning Resident Comments into Actionable Insight
Officials in Hamburg had long struggled with the fact that while citizens submitted thousands of comments on planning projects, only a fraction could realistically be read and processed. Making sense of feedback from a single engagement could once occupy five full-time employees for more than a week and chill any desire to do a follow-up conversation. Learn about how Hamburg built its own open source artificial intelligence to make sense of citizen feedback on a scale and speed that was once unimaginable.
AI for Governance
New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter Reflects on the National Gathering for State AI Leaders
As states take center stage in shaping how the U.S. adapts to artificial intelligence, their choices will determine not just whether America keeps pace, but whether it thrives. This summer, Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy convened state AI officers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and technologists for “Shaping the Future of AI: A National Gathering for State AI Leaders.” The two-day working conference focused on building practical, responsible frameworks for public-sector AI implementation. New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter closed the convening with a wide-ranging keynote that called for public AI infrastructure, trust-based governance, and co-creation across sectors. What follows is a summary of her 10 core takeaways.
AI for Governance
Governing with AI: Why Albania’s Chatbot Minister Makes More Sense Than You Think
Seoul showed 25 years ago that transparency and accountability built into digital systems can blunt corruption. Albania’s chatbot minister will stand or fall on the same test: whether it reduces opportunities for bribery.
AI and Lawmaking
Advancing Brazil’s Citizen Engagement with AI: Reflections and Opportunities
A recent Reboot Democracy series, co-authored by the head of the Brazilian Senate's e-Citizenship Office, describes how the Brazilian Senate is—and hopes to expand—using artificial intelligence to enable greater citizen engagement in lawmaking. In this blog post, the former director of the Hacker Lab in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies reflects on how artificial intelligence can deepen deliberative democracy in Brazil—and the challenges we still face.