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.

At the IPU Assembly, Rodrigo Goñi Reyes, Speaker of Uruguay’s Chamber of Deputies, outlines Uruguay’s AI strategy, emphasizing regulation as an “enabling condition” for adoption. The approach highlights sequencing, institutional trust, and global coordination, offering a model for balancing innovation, risk management, and parliamentary modernization in the AI era.

At the Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly, parliamentary leaders examined how legislatures are moving from isolated AI use cases to coordinated institutional strategies. Insights from Germany and the UK highlight challenges in governance, capacity-building, and aligning AI adoption with long-term transformation and legislative effectiveness.