​A one-day conference convening the people building, deploying and funding the most interesting applications of AI in campaigning today.

​Persuasion bots are being tested on real voters. Synthetic focus groups are shaping campaign strategy. Caseworker bots are clearing MPs' inboxes overnight. Social listening tools are seeing patterns the public can't. Agents are quietly running parts of campaigns. The pace of change is real, but the people doing the work are scattered across campaigns, unions, agencies, academia and tech, and most of them have never been in the same room.

​This conference puts them there for a day, with the tools, in front of an audience that can actually use what they're building. The day is concrete by design: working demos you can try yourself, candid panels under Chatham House where it matters, and time for discussions over drinks that the agenda doesn't cover.

​We're structuring the day around the questions the field is actively wrestling with:

• ​Can AI mimic voters well enough to replace asking them?

• ​Does AI persuasion work in the wild and would you use it?

• ​What are social listening tools seeing that the public isn't?

• ​Can AI predict elections, or just fit the last one?

• ​Which campaign and constituency workflows are ready to hand to a bot, and which absolutely aren't?

• ​Where in the content pipeline does human judgment still have to sit?

• ​Agents: working tools or demo-ware?

​For progressive campaigners, technologists, funders and academics working in or near the field.

​Spaces are limited and this event is invite only so sign up to request a place.

Campaign lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and campaigners who are working together to develop innovative election tools and improve the way we analyse and understand campaigning.

​Programme

​Every session pairs a live demo of one real tool with an honest argument about what it means for campaigning.

​9:00 Breakfast

​9:30 Where are we, really?

​Hannah O'Rourke (Campaign Lab) and Edward Saperia (Newspeak House) open the day with a conversation about what's actually working in AI and campaigning right now, what's overhyped, and what might campaigns look like in 2029?

​10:05 What happened when we ran an AI Persuasion Bot in a real election campaign?

​Campaign Lab ran an AI persuasion bot in a real campaign. Lennard Metson (LSE) demos it live and shares the field results, then Gareth Dowling, the candidate who used it, and campaigner Jana Mills (Small Axe) ask the harder question: even if it works, would you want it in your campaign, and who answers for what it says?

​10:55 Can AI mimic voters? The role of synthetic personas in campaigns

​A live synthetic focus group (Jethro Reeve), built for a real constituency, then focus group expert Charlie Buckley (More in Common) asks the question synthetic personas can't dodge: how do you know the fake answer matches the real one? Meanwhile Dr Lauren Leeks asks what are the limitations and the ethics of this approach? And most importantly... does it work?

​12:00 When everyone has infinite content, what cuts through? The role of AI in content and message production.

​Jonathan Tanner (Rootcause) makes the case for AI assisted content pipelines done well with the Drumbeat machine. Nathan Oswin (Minerva Campaigns) asks in a world of infinite, indistinguishable AI content at scale how can we cut through? How do we build out trusted messengers? With Carys Afoko (Level up co-founder and comms strategist) chairing and asking what still earns trust once everyone can produce anything?

​12:45 Lunch

​13:30 The Canvass Coach Game

​Phones out. You get trained by an AI, scored on a live leaderboard, and then argue about whether any of it would survive a real doorstep. A live demo and game from Bobi Robson (Poteris).

​14:15 Social listening: Can AI help us understand social media?

​John Bryden (Categorum) runs a hyperlocal social listening dashboard live, on real data and Noam Herberg (Campaign Lab) gets the room gets to talk through how they'd actually use it in their own campaign before hearing the practitioner's view from Ned Mendez (411). Chaired by Poppy Woods.

​15:00 Can AI predict elections?

​Patrick English (YouGov), Christabel Cooper (Labour Thinks), Dylan Spielman (Convergent Opinion) and Karin Christiansen (Campaign Lab) pick apart the gap between a model that fits the past and a prediction that survives the next election. Can AI fill this gap or is it just smoke and mirrors?

​16:00 International fireside: UK vs US

​Leah Beah (Higher Ground Labs) and Randi Lawrence (Campaign Lab) on who's actually ahead in AI campaign tech, and what each side should be learning from the other.

​16:35 Agentic workflows: working tools or over-hyped?

​A live Campaign Factory agent experiment pushing the bounds of what's now possible to automate from Fatima Khalid (Newspeak House) and Hannah O'Rourke (Campaign Lab) chaired by Ed Saperia. Then the room decides together: what's the smallest agentic workflow you'd actually trust in your own organisation next month?

​17:20 Anyone can build it now: superpower or trap?

​Watch a working campaign site go from nothing to live in eight minutes flat - demo from Chris Owen (Newspeak House) and Noam Herberg (Campaign Lab). Then Joshua Carrington (Labour Party CTO) and Peyman Owladi (Poteris) ask the bigger questions: who inherits what campaigners build? How does this shift the relationship between developer and campaigner? Does this ease buy small campaigns tools they could never otherwise afford, or a graveyard of unmaintained apps holding voter data nobody's looking after?

​18:00 Drinks + discussion corners

​No agenda, no notetaker, no end time. Find the conversation you've been waiting all day to have. With AI themed cocktails on Newspeak House Terrace.