Jigsaw

What could you learn about your community if you could hear from thousands of your neighbors, in their own words? That's a question we've been exploring with municipal and state leaders over the past year through Sensemaking AI. 🗺️ Here's where we've been: 💬 In Bowling Green, KY, 10% of residents participated in an AI-enabled town hall, generating over 4,000 proposals and 1M+ votes on their community’s future. 🗣️ In Oklahoma, 1,000 residents took part in a statewide conversation, with 73% saying state leaders felt more accessible. 🌳 In Chattanooga, TN, thousands of residents have already participated in an ongoing civic conversation focused on urban development and transportation. These efforts demonstrate the promise of technology to connect communities and surface insights in ways that traditional approaches like town halls and standard surveys cannot. Now, we’re putting that possibility in the hands of more communities. Through our new Jigsaw Partner Program, we're expanding Sensemaking AI to 30 new states, cities, and countries. We’ll help these leaders use our tools to better understand their constituents' priorities, surface areas of shared understanding, and turn public input into something they can act on. If you are a policymaker or civic leader seeking to understand your community's priorities, we invite you to express interest in using Sensemaking AI through our Jigsaw Partner Program: https://lnkd.in/g3st8fyR

Public officials want to listen. Constituents want to be heard. The bridge between them often feels broken. Traditional town halls and surveys usually capture only the loudest voices, flattening nuanced perspectives into binary data points, making it difficult to capture the full range of perspectives to best inform policy decisions. That communication gap led us to work with residents, civic leaders, and researchers to explore how technology could help facilitate more effective civic participation. Along the way, we learned something encouraging: AI can help make large-scale public conversations possible without losing the nuance, stories, and lived experiences that make them meaningful. Today, this work enters its next chapter. We're bringing Sensemaking AI, powered by Gemini, to more places around the world: 🚀 The Jigsaw Partner Program, a collaboration between philanthropies and technology platforms, to help more policymakers benefit from AI-powered civic conversations 📍 Expansion to 30 new states, cities, and countries—with the next eight localities including the largest city in Texas and our first international launches in Canada and Poland We're extremely grateful to our philanthropic partners: Google.org, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies; our technology platform partners: Change.org, Make.org, RMG Research; and the National Governors Association and the Napolitan Institute for helping to bring this work to more communities around the world. 🌎 Read more about the announcement: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gm5CpFQy

Digital and AI tools can expand what people are able to imagine, decide, and act on. They can also quietly narrow it. Most teams building these tools struggle to tell which one is happening. That's the starting point for a new practitioner's guide on measuring agency in digital and AI tools from The Agency Fund and Jigsaw, co-authored by Zezhen Wu, PhD, Beth Goldberg, and Rachel Xu. Drawing on frameworks from psychology and economics, alongside real examples from partners like Digital Green, Jacaranda Health, and Kabakoo Academies, the guide lays out three steps for teams building these tools: define what agency means for your specific users, choose measurement tools matched to the right data and the right point in the process, and test whether those tools actually capture what you intend. Alongside the blog, we are releasing two free resources: an open-source Claude Skill for brainstorming measurement approaches, and a curated NotebookLM of source material for teams who want to go deeper. 🔗 Read the full guide and access the free resources: https://lnkd.in/ezt4QJzQ

Every time you open an app on your phone, your connection reveals more than you might think. 👀 Even when your traffic is protected by HTTPS, the domain name you're connecting to is itself still visible to your internet service provider, your WiFi network, and anyone else watching. That's enough to build a surprisingly detailed picture of where you go online. Today we're taking steps to close that gap. 🔒 Android 17 is enabling Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) support, making it the first major mobile operating system to bring a new level of privacy to billions of users. To help developers adopt this protection with confidence, Jigsaw tested ECH performance at global scale, and the open source networking library OkHttp has built in support. This achievement builds on work Jigsaw has done with Android since 2018, when we helped introduce encrypted DNS support. Together, these changes help close one of the last major gaps in how much of your browsing activity is visible to anyone watching the network. Read more about what this means and how we got here: https://lnkd.in/g3FPHwE2 This milestone is a collaborative achievement across the ecosystem. We are proud to work alongside the Android Security & Privacy (Dave Kleidermacher) and Android Developers teams, open-source networking maintainers at OkHttp (Jesse Wilson), and industry leaders like Signal Messenger (Ehren Kret) and Cryptography Consulting LLC (Nick Sullivan) who continue to champion robust privacy standards.

Only 5% of U.S. adults have an advance care plan—a shared vision with their loved ones for their future health care wishes. That means for the vast majority of the 59 million Americans caring for an aging parent or spouse, critical care decisions are made during high-stress crises in hospital rooms—rather than around the dinner table. Why? Because caregiving isn't just managing the logistics. An often overlooked challenge is navigating sensitive conversations about the future that often feel emotional or taboo. We’ve spent the past year immersing ourselves in the lives of caregivers, older adults, and care managers. What we learned is reshaping how we think about human agency and family problem-solving in healthcare. Most caregivers already have ways of managing tasks and coordinating schedules. What's missing are safe, supportive ways to talk, plan, and decide together with their families—before a crisis hits. We've been exploring with experts how technology might help families bridge difficult gaps and take the future of care into their own hands. Catch up on our latest research insights on our blog here: https://lnkd.in/gvPGRGGv Authored by Ian Beacock and Shruti Verma

Jigsaw is #hiring a Public Affairs Manager in NYC—come work with us! If you’re someone who is: 🔹 Passionate about shaping how policymakers understand and engage with AI 🔹 Excited to work at the intersection of AI, health, economic security, and civic engagement Then this role is perfect for you. We’re looking for someone to be the bridge between Jigsaw's cutting-edge technology and the communities deploying it. 🚀 If interested in a nimble, interdisciplinary team doing mission-driven work, please apply to the Public Affairs Manager role directly: https://lnkd.in/gEs2QNUq And learn more about additional open roles at Jigsaw here: https://lnkd.in/geKiqbky

For too long, local government has struggled to distinguish the loudest public voices from the true heart of public sentiment. Now, Chattanooga is getting the incredible opportunity to pilot Civic Dialogue, in partnership with Google's Jigsaw and Change.org, to assess what our residents want for the future of our parks and transportation. This survey uses AI to continue the conversation in real time to survey takers, allowing the public to express complex ideas, while providing us with more in-depth, actionable data. I'm excited to see the results to help us chart the way forward! The survey will be open now through mid-August, so if you're a Chattanoogan, please take it! https://lnkd.in/ePDBAA73

✨Jigsaw is #hiring in NYC! ↪️ Enjoy rapid prototyping with the latest AI tools? ↪️ Craving 0-to-1 work with a mission you actually believe in?  ↪️ Want to translate user research into real AI-powered features? Take a look at our open roles if you want to do mission-driven work on a nimble, interdisciplinary team. Each involves connections to academia and civil society, the ability to build on Google’s latest models, and offers a quick path to taking technology to the public! If interested, please apply directly: 🚀 Senior Product Manager, Jigsaw Health AI: https://lnkd.in/gpdfQNZu 🚀 User Experience Engineer, Jigsaw: https://lnkd.in/gQEPBiTr

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide now use AI chatbots in their daily lives. But how is AI actually affecting people’s ability to shape the world around them—both as individuals and within their larger communities? We teamed up with researchers at Gemic and Google's Paradigms of Intelligence unit to find out. In an ethnographic study of 51 daily AI users across the U.S., Germany, and Singapore, we found a powerful, consistent trend: people associate their AI use with feelings of greater capability and personal agency. They feel not just more efficient, but more able to navigate the world and shape their future. Crucially, that boost often appears to stop at the individual. Use of this technology is changing rapidly, but research found little early signal that AI is being used to expand collective agency, to help communities act together. Few participants felt more empowered to shape the systems, neighborhoods, or institutions around them as a result of using AI tools. This specific gap—the missing collective gain—is exactly why Jigsaw is exploring the frontier of community AI solutions. This includes our civic engagement work in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and coming soon (!) in Tennessee, where we’re helping representatives hear from their constituents to affect real policy change. Get a sneak preview of our findings in the full preprint paper here, and let us know what you think: https://lnkd.in/gfa4BTDP Stay tuned as we continue to share what we're building and learning in this space. Authors: Ian Beacock Rachel Xu Beth Goldberg Laura Murray, PhD Patrick Anson Devika K. Jun Lee Rebekah Park Anoop Sinha

Over the next several weeks, the Napolitan Institute, with Jigsaw as its technology partner, will display "America: A 250-Year Conversation," an interactive physical exhibition at the Great American State Fair. Built from last year’s nationwide We the People initiative, the exhibit weaves contemporary American perspectives on freedom alongside foundational historical texts. Jigsaw’s AI helped structure and semantically organize nearly 2 million words of public dialogue and texts to make the experience possible. We invite you to explore the installation now through July 10 in Washington, D.C.