Artificial Intelligence and Citizen Participation: What Practitioners Need to Know

​The OECD's Public Governance Directorate, in collaboration with the Bertelsmann Stiftung, has released Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Citizen Participation, a report examining how AI tools can support and strengthen participatory and deliberative processes. Drawing on 50 real-world use cases across 22 countries, the report offers a typology of nine AI applications, from sense-making and translation to facilitation and moderation, that help governments and practitioners navigate an emerging and fast-moving field. It pairs this practical framework with a clear-eyed analysis of the risks, including exclusion, loss of nuance, and overreliance, and it insists throughout that AI should support rather than replace skilled facilitators and genuine citizen engagement. For the dialogue and deliberation community, the report is a timely resource for thinking rigorously about where technology can deepen participation and where human judgment must remain at the center of democratic practice.

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Governments and practitioners are increasingly experimenting with artificial intelligence in the work of engaging citizens, and a new OECD report offers one of the most thorough maps of that landscape to date. Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Citizen Participation, produced by the OECD's Public Governance Directorate with the Bertelsmann Stiftung, analyzes 50 use cases from 22 countries to understand how AI is actually being used in participatory and deliberative processes. The report grounds its analysis in a familiar problem: meaningful participation is hard to sustain because processes can be inaccessible, difficult to scale, disconnected from real decisions, and resource-intensive. Its central contribution is a typology of nine AI applications, including information development, sense-making, translation, transcription, virtual assistance, moderation, facilitation, simulation, and participation architecture, each analyzed for how it might address these persistent challenges without displacing the human core of the work.

​What makes the report useful to practitioners is its refusal to treat AI as a shortcut. It explicitly rejects a techno-solutionist approach, framing AI as a support tool rather than a substitute for skilled facilitators and engaged participants. The examples are concrete and drawn from practice: sense-making tools that helped a UK city council analyze consultation input in roughly half the usual time, AI-assisted facilitation platforms used to distribute speaking time fairly in large-scale deliberations, and transcription tools that let facilitators in a Belgian citizen panel document discussions with greater accuracy and less manual effort. The report notes that deliberative processes in particular have become a lively field of experimentation, with AI used to improve live facilitation and to enable deliberation at a scale that would otherwise be difficult to reach. Sense-making, virtual assistance, and translation currently stand out as the most widespread applications.

The report matters to the dialogue and deliberation field because it takes both the promise and the peril of these tools seriously. It catalogs real risks that practitioners will recognize immediately: AI facilitation that flattens minority views, consensus-drafting that oversimplifies genuine disagreement, language models that perform unevenly across languages and can quietly exclude, and the broader danger of governments substituting simulations for the harder work of actually listening to people. Its recommendations, organized around guardrails, enablers, and citizen engagement, echo values at the heart of NCDD's mission: protecting equity and inclusion, keeping human judgment central, and ensuring that participation genuinely shapes decisions. For facilitators and conveners weighing whether and how to bring these tools into their practice, the report offers a rigorous starting point rather than a sales pitch. Practitioners can read the full report at https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-citizen-participation_a1ee2e0a-en.html.