Introducing Whose AI? — a listening-first research initiative on how AI is experienced in everyday life

OpenResearch is launching a new exploratory research project, Whose AI?, focused on understanding how artificial intelligence is experienced in people’s daily lives by surfacing forms of experience, constraint, and judgment that are difficult to capture through existing methods. This work aims to both complement and challenge prevailing evidence bases, helping researchers, policymakers, and technologists ground AI development and policy decisions in a broader range of real-world conditions.

While much of today’s AI discourse focuses on capabilities, risks, and adoption rates, less attention is paid to how these systems are encountered in context, for example, through workplace systems, school platforms, screening tools, automated support lines, or sometimes not at all. Whose AI? begins from the premise that these lived experiences are central to understanding how AI is already shaping and will continue to shape people’s lives.

The project asks a set of open questions:

• How is AI entering people’s lives—and how much say do they have in it?
• When people encounter AI, how does it feel: useful, empowering, intrusive, irrelevant, or something harder to name?
• Where does AI fall short, and what would actually help?
• What possibilities do people see that are missing from current conversations?

These questions reflect a focus on variation in experience, agency, and influence across different contexts. The research is listening-first, engaging directly with individuals, educators, and community organizations to understand how AI is interpreted, negotiated, or avoided in real-world settings. 

This approach responds to a persistent gap in how AI is studied. Much of the field relies on aggregate indicators—usage statistics, benchmark performance, or modeled risks—that are useful for identifying broad patterns, but less well suited to capturing indirect exposure, non-use, and the everyday contexts in which people interpret, navigate, or set aside these systems. These are not only gaps in evidence; they are also gaps in whose experiences are most likely to inform what gets built, how systems are deployed, and which problems are treated as worth solving.

Whose AI? focuses in particular on perspectives that are often underrepresented in technology development: people with limited direct exposure to AI, communities where technological change has been uneven or slow to arrive, and those who encounter AI through institutions such as schools, workplaces, and public services, sometimes without choosing it and with limited recourse when it goes wrong. Initial research will focus on individuals and communities in the United States. We will speak with individuals and families, but also with educators, service providers, and community organizations who see patterns across many lives and can describe whether and how AI is entering the communities they serve.

The stakes are immediate. AI systems are still evolving, but many of the assumptions guiding their design are already solidifying. Once embedded in products, workplaces, and public systems, those assumptions become difficult to revisit. 

By grounding research in lived experience, this project aims to:

• Surface gaps between how AI is imagined and how it is actually encountered.
• Expand whose perspectives inform technology development and policy decisions.
• Contribute to more equitable and effective AI systems.

Findings will be shared publicly, with participant privacy protected, to help inform both product development and policy conversations.

Whose AI? brings together OpenResearch and academic partners with expertise in community-based research, public policy, and the social impacts of technological change.

The project is led by: 

• Elizabeth Rhodes, Research Director at OpenResearch
• Sudhir Venkatesh, William B Ransford Professor of Sociology & Technology and Director of the Technology and Leadership Lab at Columbia University
• Alford Young, Associate Director of the Center for Social Solutions; Arthur F Thurnau Professor; Edgar G. Epps Collegiate Professor of Sociology; Professor of Afroamerican and African studies; Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan

We welcome outreach from individuals, organizations, researchers, and funders who are interested in learning more or participating. Please contact us at whoseai@openresearchlab.org and visit whoseai.org.