How to Use AI to Streamline Your Policy Tracking Workflow

Many government affairs teams are stretched thin by the daily challenge of finding, analyzing, and reporting on new legislation. Incorporating generative AI tools into policy-tracking workflows can streamline some of the most time-consuming tasks and help you maximize your productivity.  

Let’s take a look at how you might be able to integrate AI into three common policy-tracking workflows: finding new legislation and regulations, analyzing complex policy documents, and creating reports, summaries, and policy briefs.   

Find New Legislation and Regulations in Seconds with Legislative Tracking Software

If you’re using Google alerts or a hand-built web scraping system to surface new legislation, you probably have to weed through an overwhelming number of documents to find the latest proposed policy documents. Switching to a solution that uses machine learning and natural language processing to surface only relevant mentions of your target topics can save you many hours each week. 

AI allows these tools to evaluate the context around keywords to determine the relevance of each policy document to the overall topic. This technology can significantly improve the reliability of policy tracking tools compared to those that rely on Boolean search logic. 

But incorporating generative AI tools into your workflow can save you even more time. AI search enables government affairs teams to intuitively find documents that match specific parameters just by typing queries in natural language, using the same words you’d use to describe a research task to a research assistant. 

For example, you could ask an AI search tool to find “all statements in the last six months on mining from Democratic lawmakers who sit on the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources.” AI search tools can now deliver reliable results from such queries. 

PolicyNote, an AI-powered policy monitoring platform from FiscalNote, includes AI search capabilities. Duke Grimes, public policy manager for Mid-States Distributing Company, uses PolicyNote to surface trends in statewide legislation across the country. “Using PolicyNote’s AI assistant, I typed in ‘show me all the bill drafts about Extended Producer Responsibility from 2024 sessions’ and filtered those 1,000 results down for the states I was interested in,” he explains. He says the tool helps him quickly assess the big picture and appropriately prioritize each issue. 

Using policy monitoring tools that are enhanced with AI can help you set priorities more accurately and strategically. When you’re able to assess whether a new policy requires your attention within seconds, you can focus your efforts on the most significant threats and opportunities, not just the ones you happened to find out about. 

Using AI for Public Policy Work: Analyze Complex Policy Documents to Understand their Impact

Government affairs professionals routinely face the challenge of assessing the potential impact of a 1,000-page piece of legislation. 

With their ability to summarize, analyze, and compare different texts, AI chatbots are changing the way humans interact with massive volumes of information. Instead of having to read the whole document or use word search tools to try to find relevant sections, you can chat with an AI assistant about the impact of a bill as well as how it fits into larger trends. Next time a stakeholder asks you how the latest proposed electric vehicle legislation will impact them, you can use an AI chat assistant to find the answer faster. 

However, many general-purpose AI chatbots pull data seemingly at random from websites and datasets that may not be reliable sources. To ensure the analyses are trustworthy, you need to make sure your AI assistant only has access to verified datasets. 

PolicyNote is built for government affairs teams and exclusively connects to verified state and federal legislative data sources and documents. Grimes uses the built-in AI assistant to analyze the impact of bills and ordinances and quickly put them in context. “It used to take a lot of time and staff to do that, but with PolicyNote, I can quickly summarize, put the issue in context, and see if the bill is being duplicated in other states,” Grimes says. 

Create Tailored Reports, Summaries, and Policy Briefs For Each Stakeholder

Most government affairs teams spend a significant portion of their day managing stakeholder relationships: writing, putting together position statements to share with legislators, preparing reports for supervisors, and writing legislative updates for grassroots advocates.  

While generative AI tools don’t replace the need for human writers, they can significantly speed up the writing process, especially when creating derivative content. 

Using a generative AI tool, you can ask the chat assistant to summarize the changes and their potential impact on your stakeholders. If you need to tailor your policy briefing to a specific audience, you can share details about the concerns of that audience with the chat assistant and ask it to generate a new, more tailored summary. 

PolicyNote offers built-in AI summaries for every bill or policy document, which eliminates the step of copying and pasting the bill into a chatbot. These summaries can help you review bills and make decisions about them faster, and you can also use these summaries in your policy briefings. 

Using generative AI tools to write briefings and reports for different audiences can reduce the time spent on your policy briefing workflow and protect your limited creative energy. 

Streamline Your Government Relations Workflow to Maximize Your Impact 

Generative AI is a powerful new technology that can help government relations teams keep up with the ever-increasing pace and volume of legislation and regulation that could affect their organization. By leveraging government relations software like PolicyNote for tracking, monitoring, and understanding new or updated policy, you can spend less time in the office and more time in the rooms where decisions happen.