In a recent survey of 225 public affairs professionals, Quorum found that only about a third (36 percent) say they are currently using AI technology in their day-to-day work while 64 percent are not.
However, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of public affairs professionals not using artificial intelligence say they are open to using AI once they learn more.
When asked how they were using artificial intelligence, most spoke to content creation — using AI systems to write outlines, edit talking points, or write a statement from the perspective of a particular audience. Tools like Quorum’s Copilot Message help advocacy professionals do just this, using AI to create hundreds of unique messages to send legislators in a grassroots campaign. Copilot Suggest, an AI feature of Quorum Outbox, helps edit emails to policymakers and other stakeholders to make them more engaging.
But there’s another way AI can help the public affairs industry beyond content creation: policy analysis. That’s where Quorum’s Copilot Analyze comes in.
Copilot Analyze is an interactive analysis tool trained on Quorum’s legislative data that allows users to ask questions about federal and state legislation as well as federal committee hearings. For legislation, Copilot Analyze can answer questions about bill text, plus other details like who sponsored the bill, the legislative status, if there’s an upcoming hearing scheduled, and more. For committee hearing transcripts, Copilot Analyze can answer questions about the date, time, committee, witnesses, and more.
Here are six scenarios where Copilot Analyze can speed up your policy analysis, so you can spend your time executing on your advocacy strategy and earning more policy wins.
You’re trying to decide if a new bill is worth tracking and engaging on
You get an email alert any time a new bill is introduced that mentions your policy keywords. But, not all bills mentioning your keyword are worthy of your attention. Without a tool like Copilot Analyze, a policy analyst may need to read significant amounts of bill text to understand how your organization would be impacted, and if that impact is substantial enough to track or engage on. At the federal level, this process could take hours. If you’re a state government affairs professional and your issue is appearing across dozens of states, analyzing every bill to decide its relevance could take days.
But now, there’s Copilot Analyze. You can ask it the following questions to make a decision fast:
- What does this bill do?
- How would this bill impact the [X] industry if passed?
- What are the penalties in this bill for non-compliance?
- Does this bill impose any new taxes?
- How does this bill modify existing statutes?
Congress drops a bill with only a few days before a key vote
Negotiations for a key bill in your industry have been happening behind the scenes, but now the bill text has dropped at the eleventh hour. You need to know if the language you’ve been working to get in the bill made it. Or, maybe you need to know if the text introduced poses a significant threat to your bottom line.
Copilot Analyze can get you a quick summary of the bill, and you can also ask about the key components you’re looking for. Try posing questions like:
- How will this bill impact [X]?
- Does this bill require [X]?
You want to thank a legislator for their support of the bill
A key champion has introduced a bill you were asking them to bring to the floor. Or, a neutral legislator has now sponsored the bill you care about, moving them to champion territory. You want to send out a thank you that reiterates why the issue is so important to your organization, so they continue to be vocal in the future.
In this scenario, you could ask Copilot Analyze: “Write a thank you to Sen. X for sponsoring this bill. Reiterate why it’s so important to the Y industry.”
Or, if a legislator hasn’t sponsored yet, ask Copilot Analyze to write a letter to encourage their support.
You are meeting with a member of a key committee and want to understand their stance on the issue based on the committee’s last hearing
After an election, there are new legislators on each committee. They may be freshmen without a significant legislative record, or they may be veteran policymakers new to the specific policy area. Meanwhile, your organization is trying to get up to speed on how each policymaker views the issue and how it might impact your industry. Copilot Analyze can help by analyzing lawmakers’ statements in committee hearings.
Some questions to ask:
- Which legislators spoke at this hearing?
- Summarize Sen. X’s statements in this hearing
- Based on Sen. X’s statements in this hearing, would they be likely to be a supporter of X issue area?
Your boss wants a summary of updates on a key bill that you’ve been tracking
There’s a key bill that you’ve been tracking, and it’s a critical focus of your team this year. With so many resources dedicated to this legislation, your boss wants regular updates. But generating these reports — pulling the list of sponsors, identifying any upcoming hearings, and more — is time-consuming. Instead, ask Copilot Analyze to summarize everything your boss needs to know.
Consider these questions:
- What’s the status of this bill?
- Is this bill scheduled for a hearing?
- Give me the top three bullet points of this bill so I can summarize it for my boss, who is the Head of Strategic Affairs at a major international supply company.
You need to provide advocates with a summary of a bill to help them understand why they should care
Advocates are more likely to take action if they understand the impact a bill will have on them. Policy language can be complex. While your government affairs team may understand it with a general summary, your advocates may need a summary written in simpler, more direct language.
Ask Copilot Analyze to help, with prompts like: “Write a brief summary of this bill for grassroots advocates to mobilize them for a Write a Letter campaign to their lawmakers.”
These are just six potential ways Copilot Analyze can support public affairs teams. Click here to see Copilot Analyze in action and subscribe to Quorum’s newsletter to get updates about new applications of Quorum Copilot.