Bowling Green, Kentucky, is testing a new way to curb political gridlock. Judge Doug Gorman’s BG 2050 Initiative uses AI bots to run long‑form chats with residents, bypassing noisy town halls. The experiment, backed by Alphabet’s Jigsaw, aims to surface common priorities before tackling divisive issues. It attracted 1 million participants and drew attention from policy makers across the South.

The bot conversation platform sifted through 1 million‑odd replies, flagging top concerns. After a single round of voting, 80 percent backed ideas like lifelong learning funding and infrastructure upgrades. Gorman plans to deploy these shared priorities first, hoping to build a centrist agenda that sidesteps extreme rhetoric and preserve fiscal stability for a growing population by 2045 today.

Scaling the model could reshape civic engagement elsewhere. Jigsaw is testing variants in Tennessee and Oklahoma, while Taiwan’s former tech minister Audrey Tang has launched national‑scale AI debates. British civil servants plan a similar project, The National Strategy Project, slated for summer, reflecting a broader trend toward algorithmic deliberation in governance and transparency in policy.

The pilot shows that well‑designed AI can surface shared concerns and even shift extremist views, according to research cited by Burn‑Murdoch. Yet skepticism remains; only 5 percent of Americans trust AI “a lot,” and 57 percent see more risk than reward. Still, the Bowling Green experiment signals a cautious, data‑driven approach to depolarisation for future policy making efforts.