AI and Community Engagement

There's lots of excitement at the moment when it comes to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in all walks of life, so it's only natural for that enthusiasm to spill over into the world of community and stakeholder engagement.

While there are definite opportunities when it comes to AI in engagement, there are also some definite risks. These risks are both practical and philosophical, and the implications are felt both in the short and long term.

Let's start with the most practical, which is the use of AI in data analytics. There is no doubt it can be a time saver, but with any tool, the quality of the outcome depends more on the person using the tool than the tool itself. We are seeing an increasing number of clients 'doing the analysis', meaning they are using AI. The challenge is that AI is very confident about everything it does, even when it gets it wrong.

Without proper construction of the prompts and validation of the outputs at different stages, the outcome can be very different to what the data is actually saying. For example, AI has been known to introduce (make up) data, so if your prompt does not expressly tell it NOT to do that, there is a risk to your data integrity.

AI is definitely stronger with quantitative analysis than qualitative, but if you want results that are defendable, think about how to construct your outputs so that you can trace back the logic that was used. A community member upset about a certain topic wants to know more than 'we put it into AI' to produce the report.

The long-term concern is that as a practitioner with over 20 years' experience I can look at an AI output and get a sense of whether something is on track or not. 90% of the time my inquiry back to AI results in it commenting "good pick up…". So what does this mean for people who only and have only used AI? Where does that sense check come from? Where does the art part of data science get crafted, if all you know is data in, data out regardless of its accuracy?

Which leads into the broader philosophical question. It's very natural for organisations to look for faster and cheaper ways to do things. Yet, what is fast and cheap and what is needed to build quality relationship and understanding of each other can be two very different things. Engagement is about relationship, which begs the question if the fast and cheap one is what you want to be offering the community and your stakeholders?