A Startup Wants Voters to Text With an AI Agent

A startup wants voters to engage in text message conversations with the campaigns that reach out to them – and they’re using an artificial intelligence assistant to do it.

Convos, which launched last year under the name PubSent, is betting that, by starting more open-ended conversations with voters, campaigns can deepen the impact of their texting programs, the company’s co-founder and CTO Andrew Missey said. 

Instead of spamming recipients with a “big block of information followed by a link” to a campaign website or event page, he said, an AI virtual assistant can have back-and-forth conversations focused on answering voters’ questions about a candidate or cause.

“With all the work that we’ve been doing in AI and some of the experience that I’ve had, we realized that there might be a way to incorporate that into creating real conversations around the candidates and getting more information to their voter bases,” Missey told C&E. 

Here’s how it works: new clients – think political campaigns or nonprofits – will feed information like candidate bios, platforms, policies and event information into Convos’ system. That information is then used to train an AI agent, which then sends “starter texts” out to human recipients.

Missey said that campaigns are encouraged to disclose in that starter text that there’s an AI agent behind the message and that recipients can ask questions or start a conversation with that virtual assistant. 

And while he acknowledged that some recipients are reluctant to communicate with an AI, others are quick to engage, especially when they’re told upfront that they’re texting with an AI agent.

“We’ve actually found, anecdotally, that some people are more inclined to respond and ask it questions and actually have longer, more meaningful conversations when they know that it’s an AI agent,” he said. “It’s one of the things that we’re really focused on: not trying to deceive people. We’re really focused more on building a tool that these campaigns can use to get their information across.”

The venture aims to address a growing challenge for political texting. The practice has become so commonplace in politics that many voters, feeling overwhelmed and annoyed by the outreach, have begun to tune out the texts they receive from campaigns. 

At the same time, companies like Apple have rolled out new features that can filter text solicitations out of users’ primary inboxes, making it harder in some cases for campaigns to have their texts actually read.

Missey acknowledged that there are potential issues with deploying AI in political campaigns and stressed that he and his business partner, Convos co-founder and CEO Tom Carroll, have sought to implement the technology as deliberately and transparently as possible. The system, for example, honors opt-outs from voters and can recognize context when a recipient wants to stop receiving texts.

“We’re still working on getting people comfortable,” Missey said. “One thing to point out is that – and we tell this to campaigns too – AI isn’t going anywhere,” Missey said. “But I think it’s important, going forward, that if it’s going to be used in political campaigns we have a standard for the ethical and transparent use of it.”