New Jersey AI Task Force: Understanding the Impact of Generative AI

When Governor Phil Murphy established New Jersey's Artificial Intelligence Task Force in October 2023, its working group on workforce impacts faced an urgent question: over the next five years, what will be the biggest effect from generative AI on the workforce in the Garden State?

Together with The GovLab, Citizens Foundation supported the Task Force in answering that question with the people it affects most — New Jersey's workers. Using our All Our Ideas pairwise-voting platform, the "AI and You" engagement ran for three weeks in the summer of 2024, anonymous and available in English and Spanish. More than 2,200 private-sector workers voted to create a rank-ordered list of 96 potential problems — from AI surveillance outpacing privacy law to older workers facing greater displacement.

From public voice to policy solutions

The ranked concerns then flowed into Policy Synth, our open-source agent toolkit. Smarter Crowdsourcing agents broke the issue into sub-problems — economic disparity, reduction in labor demand, occupational shifts, the pace of AI change — researched root causes, and generated and evolved solution populations over multiple generations, each scored with pros, cons and Elo ratings before human review. Workshop participants and experts reviewed and voted on every output: AI accelerated the work, people decided.

The Task Force's report to the Governor, published in November 2024, drew on this process. Concrete outcomes followed: New Jersey is implementing free AI skills training for all public servants and developing an AI-powered labor market monitoring system to help workers navigate career changes. The GovLab's Reboot Democracy blog documented the method in detail in How New Jersey's AI Task Force Used AI Agents to Develop Evidence-Based Policy Solutions.