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Good practice Imported

Broad Listening — Tokyo's AI-Analysed Public Consultation for Its 2050 Long-Term Strategy

Japan · Tokyo · See the Japan profile · See the Tokyo profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 50% 60/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

GovTech Tokyo used AI 'Broad Listening' and the open-source Talk to the City tool to cluster ~27,000-30,000 public comments into the 2050 Long-Term Strategy in weeks instead of months, publishing its analysis prompts for transparency.

~27,000
Public opinions analysed (official Tokyo Metropolitan Government figure) (Nov 2024 – Jan 2025)
~30,000
Public opinions analysed (independent press estimate) (Nov 2024 – Jan 2025)
Broad Listening — Tokyo's AI-Analysed Public Consultation for Its 2050 Long-Term Strategy

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
GovTech Tokyo / Tokyo Metropolitan Government
Period
2024-2025
Keywords
citizen engagement, public consultation, generative AI, urban policy

Context

Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Bureau of Digital Services (GovTech Tokyo) appointed AI engineer Takahiro Anno as an advisor in November 2024 to apply 'Broad Listening' — an AI method for clustering large volumes of public comment — to the city's 2050 Long-Term Strategy consultation.

Activities

Using the open-source 'Talk to the City' software, the team combined opinions gathered through Google Forms, X (Twitter) posts, YouTube comments, postal mail and street interviews (including at Ueno Zoo), automatically grouping similar viewpoints into colour-coded clusters with AI-generated summary titles, filtering out defamatory content, and publishing every analysis prompt for public scrutiny.

Results

The consultation ran roughly November 2024 to January 2025, with results announced 31 January 2025. Official Tokyo Metropolitan Government material puts the volume at about 27,000 individual opinions analysed, while independent reporting cites a comparable total near 30,000, with processing time falling from months to a matter of hours. Childcare emerged as the most prominent citizen concern, and the resulting 'Tokyo 2050 Long-Term Vision' added policy pillars on childcare, youth support, tourism and disaster preparedness.

Conclusions

City officials and Anno both stressed that AI only aggregates and visualises input; a Tokyo official said staff 'couldn't analyse this volume of input so efficiently without AI,' but Anno cautioned that 'AI can't make the final call' given trade-offs between different residents' interests, leaving final decisions to elected officials.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
GovTech Tokyo (Bureau of Digital Services) project team, Appointed AI advisor, Takahiro Anno

Conditions for success

  • Open-source 'Talk to the City' tooling rather than bespoke software
  • Multi-channel comment collection (online forms, social media, postal mail, in-person street interviews)
  • Published analysis prompts for public transparency
  • Filtering of defamatory content before clustering

Commonly funded by

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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