Artificial intelligence (AI) is part of our everyday lives. It’s the algorithm that recommends your next Netflix binge and personalises your social media feeds, the facial recognition application that recognises you and unlocks your phone, and the chatbot that answers your banking questions in the middle of the night. Despite its prevalence, there remains (rightly) a great deal of scepticism about its use.
Will relying on AI erode our own capabilities? Can it be trusted to accurately communicate complex and nuanced information? Can it truly complement or enhance face-to-face interaction and, if so, how?
At SenateSHJ, we’re energised by questions like these. They push us to explore what’s possible and help our clients navigate a fast-changing world – always with a human touch.
We know AI has the potential to change the way we work and we’re using it to enhance community and stakeholder engagement.
We’re using AI to reduce time to insights
It takes time and resources (human and financial) to plan and carry out engagement that results in meaningful insights and actions. From experience, we know that teams often grapple with the need to get as much out of each consultation/session, the need to deliver meaningful insights quickly, and the need to deliver these outcomes within tight budgets.
We’re using AI throughout the engagement process to uncover meaningful insights more efficiently. This includes using large language models (LLMs) to craft questions and communications; applying AI to digitise information from in-person workshops and sessions; and leveraging AI to collate, structure and analyse data. We also use AI to identify themes within large datasets and to visualise insights through dashboards and reports. Find out more here.
We’re using synthetic audiences to improve in-person engagement
In the pre-engagement planning phase, we’re using synthetic audiences to test and focus our engagement approach, ensuring our clients invest resources in engaging with the right cohorts on the right questions.
Synthetic audiences are emerging as a front-runner in complimentary engagement techniques. This is where we use AI to custom build personas representative of audience segments of interest to you. Then, just as we would in face-to-face focus groups, we ask each persona questions and elicit the answers and insights you need.
The quality of insights depends on the richness of data used to create the synthetic audience. We can feed proprietary data into a secure ‘walled garden’ environment to teach the model about an audience’s demographics, interests, values, concerns and past responses to similar issues. We can also feed the model prior community or stakeholder consultation reports.
These synthetic audiences are quicker to set up and more cost effective to run, getting you from engagement to insights faster. Plus, we can keep the synthetic focus group running for as long as you need.
We’re staying on top of developments in AI-assisted engagement
There’s a lot to think about when considering the use of AI in our work which is precisely why we have a team of people who make staying on top of developments a daily priority.
Our Digital, Data and Insights (DDI) team keep on top of updates to models, security/privacy concerns and ethical considerations, and try and test the use of various AI to improve how we do engagement.
We look for, and learn from, success stories in AI-assisted engagement. There is, for example, the Scottish government’s use of a tool called ‘Consult’ to speed up public consultation. The government claims the use of the tool across the 500 consultations they run every year will save the British taxpayer £20 million and 75,000 hours a year.
Or the city council that used AI to translate a council meeting as it happened – allowing attendees to choose a language for live captions and/or audio.
We believe there’s a lot we can do with AI to improve how we engage with communities and stakeholders – to make engagement more targeted, interactive and meaningful and to arrive at valuable insights quickly.