The Burnes Center for Social Change

Using AI to Help States Break Down Barriers to Skills-Based Hiring Artificial intelligence is often portrayed as a force that will destroy jobs. In this essay, Seth Harris argues that it can also expand opportunity. By using AI to identify and remove unnecessary college degree requirements in state hiring, governments can reduce barriers to public employment, address racial and class disparities, and fill critical roles more efficiently. Backed by new research underway from the Burnes Center for Social Change, supported by the GitLab Foundation, he outlines how thoughtfully deployed AI can break down barriers and accelerate the shift to skills-based hiring.

AI is often framed as a threat to jobs. But it can also expand access to work.

@mrsethharris.bsky.social shows how states can use AI to identify and remove unnecessary degree requirements and advance skills-based hiring.

A practical path to equity and efficiency:
rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/ai-for-...

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.

Recent tensions between the U.S. Dept. of Defense and Anthropic highlight that government isn’t just regulating AI, it’s one of its largest customers.

Procurement shapes markets. Will we shape AI by default or by design?

Read more: rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/public-ai

AI for Governance: How Institutions Can Provide AI Access Safely, Affordably, and at Scale As governments move from AI pilots to workforce-wide access, the hardest questions are practical: What does it cost at scale? Who gets access? How do you log usage and manage risk? How do we pair access with training so it’s safe — and actually useful?Drawing on lessons from New Jersey and Boston, this post outlines how to structure AI deployment using usage-based pricing, cloud infrastructure you control, and training designed to drive real impact.

Enterprise AI access doesn’t have to mean multi-million dollar per-seat contracts. NJ built inside its own cloud (~$1/user/month). Boston’s pilot is under $10K year one.

Pricing structure matters as much as model performance.

Read @bethnoveck.bsky.social's #AIforGovernance piece:

Reboot Weekly: Building a Culture of Recognition, AI Safety by Local Rule, and Argentina’s Strategy Reset - News That Caught Our Eye This week on Reboot Democracy, Max Stier explores how AI can strengthen internal government culture by building real-time recognition systems for civil servants. Elana Banin examines the UbuntuGuard b

📖 Read this week’s #NewsThatCaughtOurEye:

Government Strategy Needs Reimagining: An Experiment from Argentina In Argentina, the Red de Innovación Local (RIL) experimented with its AI-powered platform, PortalRIL, to shift from fragmented work plans to an inquiry-driven planning process anchored in a “Question Tree.” By surfacing patterns, trade-offs, and synergies across teams, AI helped compress months of coordination into weeks of shared clarity. The result suggests that AI’s real promise is to expand strategic horizons and accelerate collective insight, freeing public servants to focus on judgment, identity, and long-term public value.

In today’s #GlobalAIWatch, Giulio Quaggiotto explores how #RILArgentina piloted an AI-enhanced strategy process on itself before scaling to 800+ cities. The lesson: better questions expand strategic capacity.

Read more: rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/governm...

RebootDemocracy.AI RebootDemocracy.AI - We believe that artificial intelligence can and should be harnessed to strengthen participatory democracy.

Presidents’ Day honors those who have held the nation’s highest office.

But trust in government is built inside agencies day to day.

Max Stier of @ourpublicservice.bsky.social explores how AI can strengthen cultures of recognition and performance.

Read more:

Thanks for your leadership @octo.dc.gov

"This training ensures that every DC Government employee understands how to use AI responsibly, keeping people at the center of our work." — @mayorbowser.dc.gov

Read more: innovate-us.org/comms/dc-responsible-ai-training-government-workforce

#ResponsibleAI

The Demand Machine: The Realities of AI-Powered Public Service Artificial intelligence will increase demand for government services before it increases efficiency.

AI isn’t just an efficiency tool for government. It can act as a “demand machine,” surfacing unmet needs and accelerating service requests.

In a new brief, @techanddemocracy.newamerica.org and #RethinkAI explain how governments should adapt.

Read: www.newamerica.org/rethinkai/br...

The Demand Machine: The Realities of AI-Powered Public Service Artificial intelligence will increase demand for government services before it increases efficiency.

#AI can create efficiencies in public systems, but it can also be a “demand machine,” amplifying citizens’ unmet needs.

RethinkAI’s @mai-ling1.bsky.social and Neil Kleiman recommend what an adaptation plan should include in response to these increased pressures of AI.

Read now: bit.ly/4qwuZTM

Global AI Watch: Korean Public Funds for Global AI Advancements As Korea aims to become a top-three global AI power, the government has staked its strategy on “sovereign AI” as both an economic and national security priority. In this reflection, originally published in the Herald Insight Collection, Merve Hickok examines Korea’s multibillion-dollar investment in a national foundation model amid U.S.–China competition and the rise of Open-Source AI, asking whether alternative investments—such as small language models, compute and energy efficiency, and AI governance and evaluation—might better secure Korea’s long-term autonomy and global leadership.

In our latest #GlobalAIWatch, @hickokmerve.bsky.social examines South Korea’s $73.5B public investment in a national foundation model and asks whether smaller language models, energy efficiency, and stronger evaluation may be wiser bets.

Read: rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/korea-p...

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.

150+ parents helped co-design an AI tool to make IEPs clearer and more accessible.

As #AIEP’s San Francisco pilot wraps, we’re sharing what this work reveals about building AI with communities.

🗓️ Join us today at 2:00 PM ET:
innovate-us.org/human-center...

Doing Democracy with AI: Designing Public Engagement for the AI Era Leaders increasingly believe public engagement matters, but lack the practical know-how to do it well. Beth Simone Noveck and Dane Gambrell examine how institutions use AI and collective intelligence to engage the public at scale. Across countries and levels of government, engagement can move from performative to consequential when institutions build the capacity to design it well. That work now comes together in a new free course, Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era, created by InnovateUS, The GovLab, and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, to help public professionals turn these lessons into practice.

Public engagement matters. Designing it well is hard.

@bethnoveck.bsky.social and Dane Gambrell co-wrote a new #AIforGovernance blog on how AI can support participation, and where legitimacy is at risk.

We’re building a course "Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era" and seeking feedback.

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.

From insights at the @opengovpartnership.org Summit to @boston.gov, @mayorwu.boston.gov redesigned permitting to show how wicked decluttering can use AI to reorganize rules around human intent—without weakening safeguards.

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.

Early AIEP prototypes “worked” but failed where it mattered, developing polished summaries that didn’t answer the real questions parents need to advocate for their kids.

That failure reshaped the tool by putting families in the loop.

rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/unboxin...

Experimentation as Public Infrastructure Governments are adopting powerful new technologies faster than their systems are built to learn. This piece by Cassandra Madison at the Center for Civic Futures argues that responsible innovation requires more than access to tools. It requires safe, structured spaces for experimentation. By treating experimentation as public infrastructure, governments can learn early, surface risks before they scale, and make better decisions when the stakes are highest.

Governments don’t fail because they experiment. They fail because they don’t.

Cassandra Madison argues governments need safe places to fail early, so AI systems don’t fail at scale.

Experimentation isn’t a side project. It’s public infrastructure.

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Mapping the School, Seeing the System: How Spatial Context Reshaped Public Decision-Making in Uzbekistan and Bhutan Mapping schools in Uzbekistan and Bhutan revealed how data that appeared complete on paper often missed what mattered on the ground, like distance, access, and everyday conditions. By treating geography as essential, spatial data, participatory collection, and AI analysis reshaped how evidence-informed public investment and policy decisions are made.

#GlobalAIWatch: Mapping schools in Uzbekistan and Bhutan showed how data that looks complete on paper can miss what matters on the ground.

Spatial data, participation, and AI helped connect evidence to real decisions. Not louder data, just clearer.

🔗 rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/mapping...

Prediction Isn’t Intelligence: How Predictive Models Really Work in Government A hiring tool changes your "personality" score based on whether there's a bookshelf behind you in an interview. A hospital model suggests asthmatics are safer—because it learned how to respond to the triage system, not the disease. This InnovateUS workshop explains why predictive AI needs governance, not just accuracy.

At the airport, you look into a camera, get a green checkmark, and walk through.

That moment depicts both the promise and risk of AI in government. New #RebootDemocracy post featuring @randomwalker.bsky.social on why predictive models need governance.

📖 rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/predict...

Launching the Observatory of Public Sector AI: An Invitation to Build the Evidence Base Together We’re launching the Observatory of Public Sector AI, a new research initiative of InnovateUS and The GovLab that draws on data from more than 150,000 public servants nationwide. By analyzing how public employees learn, use, and adapt AI at work, the Observatory aims to identify which investments in skills and training actually strengthen government capacity, improve services, and deliver better outcomes for residents.

We launched the #ObservatoryofPublicSectorAI, one of the largest datasets to date on how public servants learn, use, and adapt AI at work. Our goal is to build the evidence on what strengthens government capacity.

Learn more: rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/launchi...

Reboot Weekly: Modernizing Regulation, Making Services Multilingual, and Listening First - News That Caught Our Eye Reeve Bull shows how Virginia is using AI to improve regulatory review, from analyzing statutes to streamlining outdated rules. Anirudh Dinesh looks to India, where the Bhashini platform expands democ

📖 Read this week’s #NewsThatCaughtOurEye:

Voices in Every Language: How India is Building More Inclusive AI India's Bhashini platform is democratizing access to digital services for 1.4 billion people by treating multilingual capability as public infrastructure. Through crowdsourced voice donations and open APIs, this initiative could transform how underserved populations access rights and resources that were previously locked behind language barriers.

Language is one of the most underestimated barriers to democratic access.

The Government of India's #Bhashini program shows what’s possible when multilingual AI is treated as public infrastructure, so people can be understood by the systems meant to serve them.

rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/voices-...

AI and the Future of State Regulation This piece examines how the Commonwealth of Virginia is using artificial intelligence to modernize regulatory review, shifting the focus from regulating AI to governing with it. Drawing on recent reforms led by the Virginia Office of Regulatory Management under Governor Glenn Youngkin, the article outlines how AI tools are being applied to analyze regulations, reduce administrative burden, and improve transparency. The "Virginia Model" offers a practical model for other states exploring how AI can strengthen core government functions.

The #CommonwealthofVirginia is using AI to modernize regulatory review, including analyzing statutes, reducing duplication, and making rules clearer while keeping humans in charge.

On #RebootDemocracy blog the “Virginia Model” shows how other states could strengthen regulatory capacity with AI.

#GlobalAIWatch: Facing worsening traffic with no room to build new roads, Hillerød, Denmark turned to residents for input.

Digital participation and AI helped synthesize 1,400+ voices into real, and unexpected, policy direction.

🔗 rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/hillero...

The NLRB Has a Data Problem. One Lawyer Is Using AI to Fix It. U.S. labor law is shaped by thousands of decisions issued each year by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the courts, yet much of this precedent remains difficult for workers, organizers, and even lawyers to access in practice. This piece examines how the NLRB’s fragmented document publication system creates real information barriers for workers and their advocates. A new tool, NLRB Research, uses open-source software and AI to make labor law searchable and and usable, demonstrating how improving access to public legal information can help empower workers to understand and act on their rights.

#ResearchRadar: Access to the law shapes whether rights exist in practice.

This piece examines how fragmented NLRB data limits worker power, and how NLRB Research uses AI and open-source tools to make labor law usable.

Read more:

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.

How does AI move from pilot to public infrastructure? In a new #RebootDemocracy interview, Dave Cole unpacks how New Jersey is scaling responsible AI across agencies backed by the Public Benefit Innovation Fund.

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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.

Interesting read from the @oecd-ocde.bsky.social: Charles Martinet & Yohann Ralle explore whether shared compute and cooperation could help mid-sized economies build frontier AI while retaining sovereignty.

Worth a look:

Research Radar: The City as Mesh and New Ways of Organizing for Effective Problem Solving The City as Mesh by Geoff Mulgan and Caio Werneck offers a powerful new framework for organizing cities to tackle cross-cutting challenges. This Research Radar examines their new paper and argues for going further: using AI as a coordination layer, treating skills as design choices, and leveraging public engagement as operational intelligence.

What’s the right way to organize government for real problem solving? A forthcoming paper by Geoff Mulgan and Caio Werneck argues cities need flexible ways of working across boundaries.

Join tomorrow’s Bloomberg Center for Cities for the conversation.

rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/researc...

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

Governments from Virginia to Ohio to San Francisco are using AI to cut regulatory clutter.

But efficiency alone isn’t reform.

In From Red Tape to Green Tape, @bethnoveck.bsky.social argues AI must be paired with collective intelligence.

🔗 rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/green-tape

Research Radar: How Research Drove a Community-Led Action Plan for LA Wildfire Recovery This Research Radar examines how California’s Office of Data and Innovation used a rigorous, community-driven approach to translate thousands of survivor contributions from the LA wildfires into a concrete recovery action plan. Combining deliberative design, large-scale digital participation, AI-assisted analysis, and human review, the engagement shows how public institutions can listen at scale, synthesize insight with integrity, and move from data to decisions when it matters most.

How can research turn community input into real policy?
This #ResearchRadar shows how CA used deliberation, digital tools & AI to turn wildfire survivor input into a recovery action plan.

📖 rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/researc...

🎥 innovate-us.org/building-a-b...

Using AI to Support Public Deliberation: A Conversation with Audrey Tang In this 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.

After months of learning in our Democratic Engagement series, the lesson is democracy works when governments can listen, learn, and act on public input.

From Taiwan to California, it shows engagement tied to decisions reduces polarization and builds trust.

rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/deliber...