As the political landscape in India evolves, there is a quiet but notable shift within political consulting and strategist firms as they are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) tools for their work. While not necessarily a groundbreaking development, the adoption of AI reflects a pragmatic approach to modernise campaign methodologies and leverage data-driven insights.
This understated yet impactful shift signals a growing recognition of the potential benefits AI can offer in shaping election strategies and engaging with voters on a more nuanced level. Yet, akin to various other domains, AI in this context also has the potential to unleash unforeseen consequences for which we may not be adequately prepared, lacking guidelines to navigate such scenarios.
Decode spoke to some of these political strategist firms who have adopted AI and look forward to reap its benefits in the upcoming 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
AI Revolution in Political Strategies
Speaking to Decode, Parag Jain, director of political strategist firm PolTek Solutions expounded on how his firm has been using AI for vernacular messaging. The Noida-based firm recently provided its services to Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) for Telangana elections held last year, and will be doing the same for Lok Sabha elections 2024.
Talking about the utility of AI in their work, he said, "Suppose there is a national spokesperson of the party who communicates exclusively in Hindi or English, making it challenging for a significant portion of the population to connect with them. To address this issue, we've developed an AI model capable of translating their message into regional languages such as Tamil or Odia. We also lip sync it to make it realistic."
Additionally PolTek will also be working for executing personalised messaging for the incumbent party. Explaining this, Jain said, "For this, we've developed a model that selects a name from a database, integrates it into a predefined template message, and subsequently dispatches the message to the respective mobile number of either the voter or the party worker." This system is effective for all three types of messages: audio, text, and video, he added.
Niranjan R, of Political Analytics, an election campaign management services company, has also been using AI for voter profiling and segmentation. Niranjan opines that AI can be an effective time saviour. He said, "We gather comprehensive information on voters, including details such as their occupation, age group, religion, and caste. This data is utilised to forecast their voting preferences, allowing us to tailor our marketing strategies accordingly."
The integration of AI proves highly efficient, streamlining the process by generating virtual analytics based on the input data, thereby saving significant time, he added.
Similarly, Smart Neta has also been using AI to analyse media content for reading patterns of voter, politician, and government. Smart Neta is a political consulting firm which has provided its services to all major national parties, and also to regional parties in Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Maharashtra and Meghalaya.
Speaking to Decode, the firm's chief technology officer Parikshit Roy Chowdhury delved into the utility of AI. He said, "Smart Neta uses AI to do profiling of booths, constituencies, and regions based on civic, social, and political topics to understand India's changing demographics. Additionally, we use data models to predict outcomes in policies, schemes, or elections."
He added, "We have been putting these statistical approach in an AI environment to be able to work with much larger and varied data sets and be relevant in more real life scenarios."
AI in Elections: What the Future Beholds
As AI continues to be a useful tool in the hands of these political strategists, they anticipate further untapped potential in this technology. For instance, PolTek Solutions is looking into phasing out the work of call centres which are used for ground surveys during elections. Jain said, "Though the model is still in our development phase, we will be using AI to do periodic surveys before voting in order to highlight the popular issue on the ground."
Within the ambit of this model, AI will initiate calls to individuals, capture their responses, and automatically produce outcomes detailing the sentiments prevailing on the ground. This, as Jain says, will provide more accurate surveys without human intervention.
Jain also talked about their plans to further upgrade their AI vernacular messaging. "As we continue to engage with AI and provide it with data, its efficiency increases. In the future, there is potential for it to independently generate messages tailored to a specific constituency, in their local language," he explained.
Similarly, Niranjan believes that AI has a great future in analytics, "In the realm of political marketing, it's crucial to recognise that voters base their decisions on the past 5-6 months rather than the past 5 years. Therefore, the strategy should rely on an extremely comprehensive dataset from this specific timeframe, and AI proves to be a valuable tool for analysing extensive datasets."
Talking further about the analytical utility of AI, Chowdhury said, "We believe AI will be used extensively to read, listen and view media and interpret patterns. Ability to analyse pictures and audio is coming soon. In the near future, campaigns will become simultaneous, more targeted and multi channel. We can just hope that the tone and content of these communication build our society than break it."
'Need regulatory framework, not fear mongering'
Considering concerns related to privacy and manipulation, similar to other fields, the use of AI in political consulting also calls for ethical and responsible practices. Speaking to Decode, these firms highlighted that despite the absence of Election Commission of India (ECI) guidelines, they follow their personal safeguards. For instance, Jain's PolTek Solutions make sure that they proceed with AI messaging only after consent has taken from the candidate.
He said, "There should be watermark on all our AI generated media to be used by any political party. Although, some social media platform, like Meta and Google, have mandated it but there is always a scope of pushing out these content via Telegram where these guidelines don't apply." According to Jain, ECI should take a proactive stance on this issue to prevent the aggressive circulation of manipulated videos on social media during elections.
Expounding on their guidelines, Chowdhury also said, "As far as Smart Neta is concerned, as a policy we only deal with public datasets or collect data ourselves. We understand data patterns and infer its relevance in real world and share the same as our recommendations."
According to Chowdhury, use of AI in different spheres of life need to be accepted as a reality in our recent future and user awareness and regulatory framework needs to be put in place. "We believe this is right time to take constructive steps towards building awareness and regulatory framework, instead of fear mongering," he added.