Swiss AI Futures: Public Intelligence for the Age of AI

Swiss AI Futures explores how people in Switzerland think AI should shape work, education, skills, and society. The project starts from a simple but urgent question: if AI is already changing how we learn, work, hire, train, and use public services, who gets to shape the future it creates?

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The study is part of the project Transforming Competencies in the Era of Large Language Models and Detecting Future Directions and is connected to a TA-SWISS technology assessment process. The project team brings together a Swiss-affiliated research consortium with partners including the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, the University of St.Gallen, LUT University, and the University of Lausanne. @gora / Carbon Copy contributed as the technology partner and app provider.

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@gora was used to host the digital participation journey, including learning modules, expert input, surveys, polls, and open-text questions. The process began with a structured expert survey. Insights from this first step were then used to shape the learning materials and questionnaire shown to citizens in the @gora app.

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In the citizen phase, participants explored short learning modules, answered polls, responded to open questions, and reflected on how AI is affecting everyday life, work, education, and society. This made the topic accessible to people without AI expertise, while still producing structured input for the research team.

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A key feature of the process was its iterative design. Participant responses did not disappear into a static survey dataset. Insights from polls and open-text answers were reviewed and translated into new content, follow-up questions, and updated prompts shown to all participants. This allowed the study to evolve as people contributed — creating a learning loop where public input shaped the next stage of the research journey.

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The project then moved from app-based participation into in-person citizen workshops in Zurich and Lausanne. In these workshops, we tested a novel deliberation tool combining AI-assisted transcription with micro-voting. The goal was to capture the richness of live discussion while making emerging patterns visible: where people agreed, where they disagreed, which concerns kept returning, and which ideas could point toward shared recommendations.

For us, Swiss AI Futures shows how @gora helps research teams move beyond traditional surveys. Instead of collecting isolated answers, the platform creates a hybrid research journey where people first learn the context, reflect through app-based questions and polls, see how their input shapes the next round, and then take part in live deliberation with more informed views. By combining learning modules, expert-informed questionnaires, iterative content cycles, live workshops, AI-assisted transcription, micro-voting, and structured analysis, @gora helps researchers generate richer public insight from complex social and technological questions.