7,700+ residents participated in the "What Could BG Be?" digital conversation (equivalent to one in 10 Bowling Green residents)
3,940 unique ideas and over one million opinions shared during a one month time frame
28 days of work saved on average in analysis, synthesis, visualization, and report writing
83% of local residents surveyed believe the AI-generated report will lead to a better plan for the future of Bowling Green
One of the largest digital town halls ever held in the United States
Warren County, Kentucky, used Sensemaker, developed by Google's Jigsaw team and powered by Gemini AI, to turn thousands of community ideas from the BG2050 Project into actionable insights, guiding their growth management and preservation planning.
Warren County, Kentucky, used Sensemaker, developed by Google's Jigsaw team and powered by Gemini AI, to turn thousands of community ideas from the BG2050 Project into actionable insights, guiding their growth management and preservation planning.
Giving everyone in Bowling Green and its surrounding area a voice
We wanted to create something that would let us be really open-ended, to let the public tell us in their own words what they wanted, what their hopes and dreams are for this community.
Doug Gorman
Judge Executive, Warren County
What happens when an entire region is invited to help shape its future? As Warren County, Kentucky, prepared for rapid growth, public officials and other local leaders wanted to give every resident in the community a voice. Estimates showed the county population would increase from 143,000 to 233,000 by 2050, which would bring significant planning challenges, as well as new opportunities.
"That's like adding the entire population of our county seat, Bowling Green, to the county all over again," says Doug Gorman, Judge Executive of Warren County. "Growth like this though, it impacts everything — the hospitals, the schools, the roads, everything. My perspective is growth can either happen to us, or it can happen for us."
Gorman wanted to ensure local residents had a clear voice in the road ahead, but didn't want to simply hold traditional town halls as even the best ideas can struggle to gain traction. "You might get eight people showing up," says Gorman. "Eight out of 150,000 residents who will tell you [an idea] is bad."
While existing digital platforms for capturing public feedback can enable hundreds of thousands to participate, extracting clear and actionable insights can take months of expensive analytical processing.
"We wanted to create something that would let us be really open-ended, to let the public tell us in their own words what they wanted, what their hopes and dreams are for this community."
How Jigsaw turned four thousand ideas into actionable plans with Google AI
In order to take the BG2050 Project forward, Warren County leaders along with Bowling Green-based innovation process strategy firm InnoEngine partnered with Jigsaw, an incubator within Google that demonstrates the potential of emerging technologies to address the world's most pressing challenges.
Working closely together, Warren County launched "What Could BG Be?," a month-long digital conversation that invited local residents to submit ideas and vote on other submissions. The initiative leveraged Jigsaw's open-source tool Sensemaker and Polis, an open source real-time tool for gathering public input.
Sensemaker leveraged Gemini on Vertex AI to categorize the ideas submitted by residents into topics and subtopics, summarize the findings and generate an initial report.
One clear priority for the community was the re-development of our riverfront. Based on this data, we've approached the federal government and initiated conversations about funding that could supercharge that transformation.
Doug Gorman
Judge Executive, Warren County
Over 7,700 local residents participated in the "What Could BG Be?" digital conversation, submitting proposals and sharing over one million opinions on the submissions from fellow residents. The AI-generated report identified thousands of ideas with high community agreement.
"What Jigsaw brought to this was so eye opening," says Gorman. "We were able to get both negative and positive feedback. We never get the positive. It was really striking to see how much alignment there was in the community. Well over half the ideas had an agreement rate over 80%."
Leveraging Sensemaker's analysis, they found 3,940 unique ideas were shared, covering 12 key topics with 70 subtopics. The tool saved hundreds of hours of manual analysis and gave the planning team more time to analyze the results and make the best recommendations for the county's future.
A series of detailed reports made possible by Sensemaker were shared with the BG2050 Project volunteer team, and a summary report was made available through a public website showing residents how their collective input had been analyzed. This transparency was critical in showing the community how their individual contributions mapped to a much larger collective effort to shape the future of Bowling Green over the next 25 years.
"One clear priority for the community was the re-development of our riverfront," says Gorman. "Off the strength of this data, we've been able to approach the federal government and initiate conversations about some funding that could supercharge that transformation."
Gorman noted that many of the submitted ideas — while falling outside the remit of the local government — can help local business leaders uncover opportunities and shape community support initiatives.
"Another area is better support for the arts and music," he continues. "Jigsaw's tools identified 330 unique ideas for new entertainment venues and activities — more than any other topic. That kind of data can really be a gamechanger for setting these priorities for the community."
With Jigsaw's assistance, BG2050 has succeeded in garnering a level of community engagement that makes it one of the largest digital town halls ever in the United States, while saving project team members an average of 28 days of work by converting the inputs into intelligence automatically.
"Google's Jigsaw team helped increase the scale of what we are doing," says Gorman. "We're now looking forward to incorporating this feedback into the ongoing vision for our fast-growing community."
Warren County Government includes the fiscal oversight and management necessary for the construction and maintenances of roads, parks, water and sewer systems, solid waste services, building and electrical permits, legal and penal venues, health and welfare, emergency management and rescue activities, law enforcement, and records, including citizen services in relation to all these matters.
Industry: Government
Location: Kentucky, United States
Products: Gemini, Vertex AI, Sensemaker
