Governing with AI: Future-ready policy decisions need adaptive systems

Artificial intelligence can help enable real-time decision-making, but its potential depends on how govts adapt

It is evident that artificial intelligence (AI) tools and their capacity to bring together immense knowledge and undertake complex analysis can contribute a lot to the world of governance and policymaking. But whether it does, or by when, depends upon how well the government can incorporate AI within its own processes. 

Governance is no doubt a complex set of activities characterised by limited information and resources to undertake them. The activities themselves require an aggregation of qualitative and quantitative information, beliefs and preferences, ethics and morality, democratic norms and the role of lobbies, history and path dependence, capacities and resources,