Artificial intelligence and online participation: feasibility analysis in Sao Paulo's participatory budgeting

This paper presents essential, globally relevant insights to guide smart cities in scaling Artificial Intelligence (AI) effectively to achieve enhanced civic engagement. This conceptual study contributes to emerging literature on AI in democratic innovation and participatory democracy. It addresses feasibility analyses as a critical bottleneck in participatory processes such as participatory budgeting: ad-hoc feasibility shows the transformative potential of AI in participatory initiatives. Through an exploratory case study on São Paulo's participatory budgeting, our analysis identifies how manual feasibility assessments create significant delays and high rejection rates for citizens’ proposals, where more than every tenth proposal was rejected. The research demonstrates how AI can support the process, including data retrieval systems and automated summarization. The main focus is on ad-hoc real-time feasibility checks. Furthermore, we analyse the required state capacity and capabilities for implementation. While AI offers substantial potential to improve participatory governance, it also demands organizational transformations.