Not Just the Tools: Reclaiming Agency and Equity in the Age of AI
At this year’s ScotPEN Gathering 2025, we found ourselves asking a pressing question:
We’ve built the tech. We’ve trained the models. We’ve launched the tools. Now what? And more urgently, was it really “we”?
This question lingered in the air at ScotPEN 2025, the annual Scotland Public Engagement Network gathering, where we had the privilege of joining a vital conversation about what it means to do public engagement with communities, not just to them, in the age of AI.
Together with Angela Daly, Theodore Koterwas, and Nicola Osborne, we unpacked the realities and tensions shaping our collective digital future. What emerged was not just a critique of exclusionary innovation, but a call to reimagine how we engage, build, and care in sociotechnical systems.
Beyond the Buzzwords
AI is no longer an abstract concept, it’s embedded in how we search, decide, relate, and learn. Yet most of the systems shaping these processes are too often designed behind closed doors, without the communities most affected by them. Public engagement becomes reactive at best, an afterthought rather than a foundation.
At IDEA, we ask: What would it look like if inclusion, care, and co-creation weren’t retrofitted, but built in from the start?
Digital Inclusion as Public Engagement
From digital poverty and data bias to language gaps and the invisibility of care, the session surfaced a shared truth: the “public” in public engagement is never neutral. Who gets to speak, participate, or even be counted is shaped by deeper structural inequalities.
Our work at the IDEA Network builds on these insights. Through research and community programmes that centre participatory design, open knowledge, and digital justice, we’re working to create pathways for those often excluded from AI-driven futures to be not just consulted, but to lead.
Looking Forward
We left ScotPEN 2025 with more than ideas—we left with renewed urgency. The energy in the room was grounded, critical, and hopeful. These conversations reminded us that real engagement is relational, place-based, and led by those already shaping their digital realities.
As we move forward, we carry these lessons with us, committed to going beyond institutional boundaries to support the knowledge, insight, and lived experience already driving change. Our goal is to amplify these efforts through collaborative research and more inclusive, community-rooted design practices.