Using AI for research and policy analysis

What AI is good for here

Policy work involves a lot of reading. Officers preparing a summary, a working paper or a cabinet note often need to understand what others have tried, what the evidence says and what the options are. AI can speed up parts of this: finding a starting set of material, summarising long reports, laying out options side by side and producing a first draft of the analysis.

It cannot decide what is right for Pakistan. It does not know your ministry's constraints, the political context or what was tried here before and why it failed. That judgement stays with you.

Before you start

1. Use approved tools for official material. Do not paste draft policy, cabinet papers or anything classified into a public chatbot. See data leakage.
2. Treat every claim as unverified. AI tools can invent studies, authors, figures and quotations that look entirely real. See hallucination.
3. Know the tool's limits. Many tools have a knowledge cutoff and may not know about recent laws, policies or data.

Step by step

1. Frame the question yourself. Write down the policy problem, the decision needed and the constraints before you open any tool. A clear question gives better results and stops the tool setting your agenda.
2. Scan for material. Ask the tool for types of evidence and approaches to look for, such as "what kinds of interventions have countries used to reduce delays in issuing birth certificates?" Use the answer as a list of leads, not as evidence.
3. Find and read the originals. For every study, report or law the tool mentions, locate the original from a reliable source. If you cannot find it, assume it does not exist. See How to check AI citations.
4. Summarise documents you have checked. Once you have the real sources, AI is useful for summarising them. Give it the actual text and ask for a summary grounded in that text only. See grounding.
5. Compare approaches. Ask for a table comparing options against criteria you set: cost, time, capacity needed, risks, fit with Pakistani conditions. Check every cell against your sources.
6. Draft the analysis. Ask for a first draft structured the way your office requires. Then rewrite it in your own judgement, adding local context the tool cannot know.
7. Have it challenge you. Ask: "What are the strongest arguments against this recommendation?" or "What evidence would change this conclusion?"

Example instructions

Here are summaries of four reports on e-procurement reform [pasted]. Compare them in a table with columns for approach, reported results, conditions for success and risks. Use only the information I have given you. Mark anything uncertain.

Read this draft policy note [pasted, non-sensitive]. List the assumptions it makes and any claims that need a source.

What to check

• Every source exists, says what the AI claims it says and is current
• Figures are copied from the original, not from the AI's summary
• Examples from other countries are relevant to Pakistan's context
• The analysis includes views and evidence that cut against your preferred option
• Nothing in the final paper rests on the AI's word alone

Keeping judgement human

AI tends to produce balanced-sounding text that can hide weak reasoning. It may also agree with whatever framing you give it. See sycophancy. A smooth paragraph is not evidence of a sound argument.

The officer signing the analysis must be able to defend every claim and every recommendation without reference to the tool. If you would not be comfortable explaining a point to your secretary or a parliamentary committee, check it again.

Record on file which parts of the work AI helped with. See Keeping records when AI helps with official work.

What not to use it for

• Final recommendations to decision-makers without your own analysis
• Quoting laws, rules or court judgments you have not read in the original
• Predicting political or public reactions as if they were facts

Related prompt: Find gaps in a draft policy.