Overview
Discover how artificial intelligence is reshaping community engagement — from smarter planning and multilingual chatbots to rapid feedback analysis and tailored follow-ups. In this session, Dan Ferguson unpacks what AI can really do today (and what remains hype), shares examples of practical tools in action, and underscores why ethics and transparency matter more than ever. Learn how to harness AI to make engagement more inclusive, efficient, and trustworthy.
We're going to be covering....
- Setting Expectations: Demystify AI in engagement. It already accelerates tasks like data analysis and chatbot interactions, but it’s not a cure-all.
- Plan: Use AI tools to analyse demographics, mine social data, and predict key community issues, enabling more strategic, evidence-based planning.
- Engage: Demonstrate AI-driven engagement tools; multilingual chatbots, voice assistants, and content simplifiers, that improve accessibility and free staff for deeper conversations.
- Review: Show how NLP can process thousands of comments to surface sentiment and themes beyond keywords, illustrated with a sample AI-generated insight dashboard.
- Follow Up: Highlight automated ways to close the loop, from thank-you messages to “What We Heard” summaries tailored for different audiences.
- Ethics & Trust: Stress transparency and oversight, referencing the 2024 OVIC privacy breach as a cautionary tale on responsible AI use.