Governing with AI

Artificial intelligence can help enable real-time decision-making, but its potential depends on how govts adapt

- LAVEESH BHANDARI

It is evident that artificial intelligence (AI) tools and their capacity to bring together immense knowledge and undertake complex analysis can contribute a lot to the world of governance and policymaking. But whether it does, or by when, depends upon how well the government can incorporate AI within its own processes.

Governance is no doubt a complex set of activities characterized by limited information and resources to undertake them. The activities themselves require an aggregation of qualitative and quantitative information, beliefs and preferences, ethics and morality, democratic norms and the role of lobbies, history and path dependence, capacities and resources, and other factors. And the fact that geopolitics is making the policy environment so volatile makes it even more complex. In such a situation, we need to ask the simple questions: What might AI bring to the table, and is it worthwhile thinking about how to use it for governance?

Answering the first question - how AI can help government - is easier. Many ideas have been proposed, including those related to better targeting of welfare, improved monitoring, better policy design, superior initiatives focusing on behaviour change, improved analysis of scenarios and alternatives, automated audits and real-time monitoring, almost real-time analysis of citizen feedback, and perhaps even redress of grievances, among many others.