ID: 1537
Presenting Author: Ildiko Almasi Simsic
Session: 552 - Accelerating with Integrity: Strengthening Social Impact Assessment in the face of urgency and misinformation
Status: pending
A case study of DiscloseAI, a piloted AI platform making project data accessible via multilingual chat/voice, while its immutable audit trail for grievances ensures true proponent accountability.
Impact Assessments (IA) often produce hundreds of pages of technical documents, frequently only in English. This creates significant barriers for affected people and civil society, who struggle to interpret complex information about risks to their livelihoods, potential resettlement, and safety.
This paper presents a case study of DiscloseAI, a piloted, cloud-native platform designed to bridge this information gap. Deployed as a multilingual chatbot widget on project websites, it has two core functions:
Accessible Disclosure: It provides stakeholders with instant access to the project's entire knowledge base of disclosure documents. Users can ask questions in their own language or use voice commands if illiterate, making technical ESIA text truly accessible for the first time.
Grievance Registration: It offers a simple, direct channel to log complaints and receive updates.
The core innovation for accountability is its Cloud-Based Digital Audit Trail. Unlike easily manipulated paper-based or spreadsheet logs, every grievance received through the chatbot is stored in a secure, non-editable cloud database that the project proponent cannot unilaterally alter. This creates a unique, verifiable record for transparent complaints management, supported by an online dashboard with statistics.
Pairing AI-powered accessibility with an immutable grievance log, DiscloseAI fundamentally shifts stakeholder engagement from a compliance exercise toward verifiable transparency and demonstrable accountability.
Ildiko Almasi Simsic is an award-winning author, social development specialist, podcast host, and founder of E&S Solutions, passionate about AI as a tool to innovate and empower development practition