What Could BG Be? — Bowling Green's AI-Synthesised Public Input for a 25-Year City Plan

Bowling Green and Warren County, Kentucky ran a month-long online public-input campaign, 'What Could BG Be?', to shape BG2050, a 25-year comprehensive city plan, built with Google's technology incubator Jigsaw and local firm Innovation Engine.

The campaign used Jigsaw's Sensemaker, an AI tool that categorises large volumes of open-ended public comment into topics and measures where agreement and disagreement lie across the respondent population. About 8,000 residents — roughly 10% of the city's population — submitted close to 4,000 distinct ideas and weighed in on each other's submissions over a million times combined.

Sensemaker distilled the input into 2,370 discrete ideas that at least 80% of respondents agreed with, cutting across the usual partisan and demographic divides on topics such as parks, housing, mental health and transportation. City and county staff estimated the tool saved an average of 28 work-days of data analysis, synthesis, visualisation and report-writing compared with a manual process.

Officials say findings have already fed into zoning-reform discussions and plan to repeat the exercise annually; this was reported as the first large-scale, real-world proof of concept for Sensemaker. The process still relies on self-reported staff time-savings estimates rather than an independent audit, and there is limited public detail on how AI-clustered ideas were checked against the raw comments before being adopted into planning decisions.