Exploratory Research · Technology & Everyday Life
Whose
AI?
Understanding how AI enters — and misses — everyday life. Who encounters it. Who shapes it. And who gets left out of the conversation entirely.
Who We're Hoping to Speak With
We want to hear from people wherever they are with AI
We're interested in speaking with:
- People who use AI regularly
- People who don't use it at all — whether they haven't tried it, don't trust it, didn't find it useful, or don't have access
- People who've encountered AI through work, school, or public services
- Community organizations, educators, and service providers working closely with the communities and questions at the center of this research
Participation means a conversation. We want to hear what you've seen, tried, or avoided — and what technology that works for you would look like.
Get Involved →What We'll Explore Together
Questions guiding this work
This work is about understanding how AI is experienced, interpreted, negotiated, or set aside in everyday life, and where those realities differ from the assumptions shaping current debates. Findings will be made publicly available. Participant privacy will be protected.
01
How is AI entering people's lives — and how much say do they have in it?
02
When people do encounter AI, what does it feel like: useful, intrusive, irrelevant, something harder to name?
03
Where AI falls short or doesn't fit, what would actually help? Better tools, broader access, stronger protections, clearer rules, or something else entirely?
04
Where do people see genuine possibility — things AI could do for them or their communities, or ways it could work better? And what do current conversations about AI seem to be missing?
Our Approach
Listening first.
This is listening-first research. We are not starting with fixed hypotheses — we are starting with open questions and learning from people's experiences in context.
We want to hear from individuals and families, and from educators, service providers, and community organizations who see patterns across many people's lives. We are especially focused on communities often missing from AI conversations — rural areas, families balancing work and caregiving, and places where the benefits of technological change have been uneven or slow to arrive.
Context matters. What feels urgent in one setting can be invisible in another. What barely registers as a problem for some can define the limits of what's possible for others. These differences are consequential, and they're at the center of what this work is designed to address. We're doing this to help inform technology and policy that works for more people and to reduce the gaps that leave some communities bearing more risk with fewer benefits.
Why This Matters
Shaping what comes next.
Some people actively experiment with AI tools and integrate them into how they learn, earn, and organize their lives. Others encounter AI indirectly — through workplace systems, school platforms, screening tools, or automated support lines — without choosing it, and often without clear recourse when something goes wrong.
And many people still have little exposure at all, see AI as irrelevant to more immediate concerns, or have tried it and decided it is not worth their time, attention, or trust.
"Whose AI?" is our starting question. It asks who engages AI directly and who is exposed through institutions, who finds it relevant and who does not, and who has meaningful opportunities to shape how these technologies evolve.
Most research on AI focuses on how many people use it, what it can do, and what could go wrong at a large scale. Far less attention goes to how AI is actually experienced — or not experienced — by people navigating real constraints in their daily lives. These differences are not just descriptive. They shape who gets listened to, who gets overlooked, and who ends up carrying the costs.
AI systems are still taking shape. But many of the assumptions guiding their development are already solidifying. Once embedded in products, institutions, and policy, those assumptions become much harder to revisit.
This is a moment when what people think and experience can shape what gets built, and we hope to partner with individuals and communities to broaden whose experiences inform the next phase of technological change.
We're looking for individuals, educators, and community organizations to participate. Reach out to get involved.
Email Us →Who Is Involved
Led by OpenResearch
This work is led by OpenResearch in collaboration with a cross-disciplinary team who share a commitment to listening-first research.
OpenResearch is a nonprofit research organization. We study economic stability, technological change, and how policy and technology shape everyday life. By building long-term relationships, bringing together different kinds of expertise, and developing new ways to do research, we gather and share insights that help shape better policies and products — and help ensure more voices shape what gets built and who it serves.
Research Team
Led by Elizabeth Rhodes, Alford Young, and Sudhir Venkatesh, our team brings together the OpenResearch staff and academic partners with collective experience in community-based methods, public policy, and how technological change shapes work, access, and opportunity.
Advisory Group
Educators, community leaders, and practitioners who bring grounded perspective on how AI systems intersect with daily life.
Institutional Partners
Service organizations, community groups, research labs, and technology companies whose work intersects with the communities and questions we're studying.
Lead Researchers
Research Director, OpenResearch
Elizabeth Rhodes, MSW, PhD
Elizabeth leads research on economic security, work, and technology in the lives of individuals and communities. Trained in social work and political science, she directed the most comprehensive study of unconditional cash transfers in the United States — a three-year, 3,000-person randomized controlled trial examining how direct income support affects well-being, health, financial security, and employment. That research was grounded in close listening — to what people experienced, what helped, and what remained out of reach.
Her work increasingly focuses on how technology intersects with economic inequality: how people encounter AI in workplaces, public systems, and everyday decision-making, and how emerging tools shape opportunity, risk, and access. "Whose AI?" grows from that same commitment — to understand not just what these systems can do, but what they actually do, and for whom.
William B Ransford Professor of Sociology & Technology, Columbia University
Sudhir Venkatesh, PhD
Sudhir Venkatesh is William B Ransford Professor of Sociology & Technology, and Director of the Technology and Leadership Lab, at Columbia University. He has built and led research and product teams at Facebook and Twitter, served as Senior Advisor to the Department of Justice, and was appointed the Academic Director of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership.
Together with Tracey Meares (Yale Law), he currently co-directs an active research network on digital life. He and Meares co-edited a series of essays on platform governance for The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and he is curating a series of essays on platform operations for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He is the author of five books, a New York Times bestseller, and has published award winning documentaries and stories for National Public Radio, This American Life, and PBS.
Associate Director of Center for Social Solutions; Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Public Policy, University of Michigan
Alford A. Young, Jr., PhD
Alford Young Jr. has pursued research on low-income, urban-based African Americans, employees at an automobile manufacturing plant, African American scholars and intellectuals, and the classroom-based experiences of higher-education faculty as they pertain to diversity and multiculturalism. He employs ethnographic interviewing as his primary data collection method.
His work brings particular attention to how people interpret and navigate social change in their everyday lives. He explores the connections between individuals' social location—such as differences in residential environments, work histories, and schooling experiences—and the content of their beliefs about mobility, work, and other social issues.