Most parliamentary AI tools serve staff and Members rather than connecting citizens to lawmakers. A study mapping 72 tools finds only five link different actors, with Brazil’s citizen-comment summaries and Chile’s Member-drafting tools as exceptions, raising questions about efficiency, participation, and representation in legislatures.

Parliaments worldwide are adopting AI faster than they're governing it, with unsanctioned "shadow AI" tools signaling gaps in official systems. Institutional AI offers a framework separating legislative AI from consumer or enterprise tools, keeping core functions human while AI assistance scales with a decision's stakes.

The European Parliament, Chile's Chamber of Deputies, and the US House of Representatives are testing distinct approaches to institutional AI adoption — centralizing access through a new platform, regulating disclosure and accountability, and empowering staff to build their AI tools — revealing three competing theories about legislative AI risk.

State legislatures across the US show uneven AI adoption, with staff usage nearly doubling in a year while formal policies lag behind. Institutional knowledge often rests with single experts, and human review requires genuine source verification, not passive oversight of AI-generated output.

Canada's new national AI strategy and Parliament's human-centered AI approach, IPEN's leadership transition to Sarah Moulds, and comparisons between Commonwealth Parliaments and US state legislatures on institutional culture and technology. Plus IPU's Geneva AI governance talks, Tajikistan's legislative AI training, and POPVOX Foundation's NCSL Chicago reception on parliamentary modernization.

Two years of ModParl reveal what legislatures need for AI adoption: digitized information foundations, an institutional lens treating parliaments as information processors, AI literacy across staff and Members, engaged leadership, ICT-staff collaboration, governance frameworks, and incremental experimentation building toward institution-wide strategy rather than isolated pilot projects.

Annelie Lotriet, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa, examines why artificial intelligence readiness demands institutional leadership, not just ICT solutions. She explores Member literacy gaps, university partnerships, disinformation risks, and how AI could transform legislative oversight, research, and citizen engagement across national and provincial parliaments.

African parliaments are exploring how AI can unlock the value of digitized parliamentary records — from searching Hansards and tracking legislation to monitoring government assurances. The Digital Parliaments Project, led by POPVOX Foundation and partners, is building the data infrastructure to make that possible.

Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical frames artificial intelligence as a civilizational threat to human dignity and democracy — but is that framing too deterministic? A nuanced look at AI's democratic risks and possibilities, situated within a longer transformation of informational life already reshaping political institutions.

How the NYC Council built a digital infrastructure to manage its legislative workflow — from an AI-powered duplicate checker that resolves sponsorship disputes, to a RAG system preserving institutional memory, to automated compliance tracking — and what it means for legislative modernization more broadly.

One year on, the UK House of Commons Modernization Committee has advanced coordination and institutional reform — but largely sidesteps AI and digital transformation. The gap highlights growing tension between modernization efforts and rapidly evolving technologies reshaping legislative workflows, decision-making, and institutional capacity worldwide.