Rather than relying solely on traditional public meetings or open-ended surveys, Bowling Green and Warren County officials used SenseMaker, developed by Jigsaw, to digest and categorize large volumes of resident feedback and create a shared community vision for the next 25 years. Jigsaw is an interdisciplinary unit within Google that builds technology that inspires scalable solutions.
The effort began with 100 community leaders from Warren County gathering to outline long-term goals for the city and county. Partnering with Innovation Engine, a local strategy firm, they discovered a more advanced, tech-enabled way to collect resident input — opening the door to broader engagement than they had initially imagined.
During the monthlong What Could BG Be? conversation, residents submitted their input through a newly launched project website, where an open-ended prompt — powered by the interactive tech platform Polis — invited them to share what they hoped to see in their community over the next 25 years.
When officials started working on the BG 2050 initiative, “I didn’t conceive of it being possible to find a meaningful and productive way for us to get input from thousands of other residents beyond our core team of volunteers,” Doug Gorman, Warren County’s judge/executive, said in a statement. “We definitely couldn’t have achieved that through traditional formats like town halls, where it’s difficult to get the word out.”
The AI pilot boosted community input nearly 80-fold, Jigsaw said Tuesday in a Medium post, thanks to a large-scale online dialogue that invited residents to weigh in on everything from upgrading stormwater systems to increasing local attractions. SenseMaker then transformed that data set into an interactive public report highlighting common themes and priorities.
The numbers spoke for themselves. In just 33 days, 7,890 residents weighed in over one million times on the future of Warren County, the report said.
Jigsaw’s technology, Gorman said, “helped increase the scale of what we are doing, and we’re now looking forward to the hard work ahead of incorporating this public feedback into a comprehensive and ongoing vision for our fast-growing community.”
The pilot is a key part of Bowling Green’s broader push to modernize public engagement and ensure future planning includes diverse and representative community voices.
With the conversation phase now complete, the city has a clear set of priorities shaped by resident input — from familiar concerns like traffic and road management to aspirations for more nightlife, entertainment options and the preservation of green space.
Initially, local leaders selected eight core areas to frame the online dialogue: economic development, housing, infrastructure, public health, quality of life, storytelling, talent development, and tourism. But as the engagement grew, so did the conversation. SenseMaker ultimately identified 12 new subtopics that emerged organically, including interest in K-12 education.
To now bring those ideas to life, Gorman said the county has formed pillar groups around the original eight themes — each with 10 to 12 people with varied expertise — that will begin working on their specific area.
“If you're on tourism, some of the things you want to do with tourism are going to affect infrastructure and so on because it’s all connected,” Gorman said during a livestream Tuesday about the project. “They'll work individually, then come together.”
After that, he said, the county will have decision-makers and elected officials review their findings, joined by Chamber of Commerce and city planning and zoning staffers, to map out plans.
AI energized a powerful tool for sorting and summarizing massive amounts of data almost instantly, but their role, county and city leaders acknowledged during the livestream and on Medium, is to interpret that data within specific social and geographic contexts.
The pilot was Jigsaw’s first large-scale proof of concept for SenseMaker and, it said on Medium, offered a useful frame of reference through which to navigate community development.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated with additional information on the roles of Jigsaw and SenseMaker.
