An AI assistant for group discussions: how we tested Dembrane

During the third session of the Deliberative Democracy Lab, we tested Dembrane — an AI assistant for documenting conversations developed by a Dutch team that brings together key takeaways, disagreements, and priorities in a single dashboard. 

For both Dembrane and us, this was an experiment in exploring how AI tools can facilitate consensus-building in large groups.

Here are some of our observations:

• Dembrane reduces the workload for both the group and the moderator, allowing participants to focus on the discussion rather than on taking notes. 
• The more frequently you return to the AI assistant during the discussion, the more meaningful and nuanced the results become.
• It recognises Ukrainian fairly well, although it still struggles with grammatical cases and gender agreement.
• Questions of trust in AI and data security remain open. Although the tool is ISO-certified, complies with GDPR requirements, and allows anonymity settings to be adjusted, this is not sufficient for everyone — and that is perfectly understandable.

We structured the prompts in a way that led the tool to prioritise majority opinions, while minority voices got lost. A valuable lesson: minority perspectives need to be protected with a separate instruction.

One more practical point: even with a discount, a monthly subscription is still a noticeable expense for Ukrainian civil society organisations. We therefore suggested that the developers consider introducing a pay-per-event option.

We are grateful to Dembrane for the discount provided and for their attentive support throughout the process.