The Situate AI Guidebook: Co-Designing a Toolkit to Support Multi-Stakeholder Early-stage Deliberations Around Public Sector AI Proposals

Public sector agencies are rapidly deploying AI systems to augment or automate critical decisions in real-world contexts like child welfare, criminal justice, and public health. A growing body of work documents how these AI systems often fail to improve services in practice. These failures can often be traced to decisions made during the early stages of AI ideation and design, such as problem formulation. However, today, we lack systematic processes to support effective, early-stage decision-making about whether and under what conditions to move forward with a proposed AI project. To understand how to scaffold such processes in real-world settings, we worked with public sector agency leaders, AI developers, frontline workers, and community advocates across four public sector agencies and three community advocacy groups in the United States. Through an iterative co-design process, we created the Situate AI Guidebook: a structured process centered around a set of deliberation questions to scaffold conversations around (1) goals and intended use or a proposed AI system, (2) societal and legal considerations, (3) data and modeling constraints, and (4) organizational governance factors. We discuss how the guidebook's design is informed by participants' challenges, needs, and desires for improved deliberation processes. We further elaborate on implications for designing responsible AI toolkits in collaboration with public sector agency stakeholders and opportunities for future work to expand upon the guidebook. This design approach can be more broadly adopted to support the co-creation of responsible AI toolkits that scaffold key decision-making processes surrounding the use of AI in the public sector and beyond.