AI for Deliberation and Consensus

Research team
José Ramón Enríquez, Sandy Pentland, Lily L. Tsai, Jiaxin Pei, Alia Braley, Umar Patel, Lula Chen
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Existing venues for public engagement, from town halls to online comment threads, fail to foster thoughtful discussion about complex policy issues. Attracting only a selection of voices, these models constrain not only whose preferences are heard, but which solutions can even be imagined.

 

Generative AI offers an alternative by reducing participation costs while optimizing for inclusivity, engagement, and consensus. When purposefully designed, AI can facilitate the kind of structured, reason-giving dialogue that helps diverse communities identify shared priorities and workable policy trade-offs. Yet the design space remains largely unexplored—most platforms operate on heuristics rather than evidence, and we lack systematic knowledge of what promotes civil discourse, broad participation, and actionable outcomes at scale.

 

 

Our research provides rigorous, empirical evidence on how to foster meaningful civic participation in the digital age. We study the mechanisms that enable diverse publics to articulate nuanced preferences, engage with opposing views, and co-produce implementable policy—while preserving agency, augmenting citizenship, and amplifying underrepresented voices.

José Ramón Enríquez Postdoctoral Fellow

The cost of designing better solutions to longstanding problems has never been lower. Harnessing AI for civic engagement is both necessary and possible.

One flagship application is deliberation.io, an open-source platform purpose-built for public reasoning on consequential policy questions. The platform combines modular AI tools including Socratic dialogue, real-time preference visualization, comment ordering, and policy synthesis that can be mixed and matched for different contexts. We have also scaled to real policy settings with partners in the US and Ghana to facilitate discussion on topics like AI in education, AI in digital services, human rights, and governance reforms.

Go to deliberation.io
In July 2025 the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, along with the MIT Governance Lab, announced a collaboration with the Bowser Administration and the Office of the Chief Technology Officer that made Washington, D.C. the first city in the U.S. to use deliberation.io to strengthen collective decision-making.
José Ramón Enríquez Postdoctoral Fellow

At DEL, we aim to advance the frontier of knowledge while building scalable tools that can redefine how communities make decisions collectively.