I launched an AI innovation lab, you should be using Hex, and what I've been cooking 🤖🔮📕 🍳

tech and data person #7

Hello,

So it turns out I had pneumonia. I’m doing better now (thank you for asking), but this last month has been a roller coaster of slogging through persistent fatigue, going through multiple bottles of NyQuil in an attempt to get some sleep, and riding the antibiotic-to-antifungal medication rollercoaster all while navigating my new C-suite role in what is shaping to be an absolutely brutal electoral cycle.

I’m doing much better now, and I’m taking this long holiday weekend to rest before I sprint for the remainder of the cycle. And even though the pneumonia, I have a lot to share with y’all this week (:

WFP has an AI lab now 🤖

Like many of you, my feelings on AI have run the gamut from skepticism and fear to awe and concern. I've worried about job displacement and algorithmic bias while simultaneously marveling at AI's potential to solve complex problems. What I have come to realize is that AI is here and changing the way we work, whether we like it or not.

I also believe that if the left does not doesn’t decide AI’s role in democracy, that AI tools fundamentally won’t work for us or our communities. Without our input and values guiding its development, AI tools may inadvertently perpetuate or exacerbate existing inequalities. However, by engaging with AI, we can harness a powerful tool for social change. It has the potential to revolutionize how we organize, communicate, and mobilize for progressive causes. We need to ensure that these powerful technologies will work for us and our communities.

Working Families Party is a trusted leader on the left that has won hundreds of elections for candidates that champion the working class, and in recent years, we have made significant investments in tech and AI capacities.  In 2022, we incubated the startup, Votivate, to provide affordable voter file access to candidates and organizations. In 2023, we joined forces with a data science company to supercharge Votivate and the Working Families Party with powerful AI technology, enabling progressives to organize smarter at scale.

🚀 Now, we are launching WF Labs to be the center of gravity for AI on the left to fuel movement organizations, campaigns, and labor institutions to organize the multi-racial working class at scale. We intend to leverage our newly acquired technological resources to build AI software, tools, and apps that unlock a new paradigm of organizing for the left. We're assembling a Product Advisory Committee with expertise from labor, campaign, and movement spheres to guide product development at Votivate and beyond. Our goal is to innovate a suite of campaign tech tools that empower organizers nationwide.

Through these efforts, WF Labs aims to create a world where

• the admin and data minutiae of organizing work is automated away,

• campaigns can identify and mobilize supporters with pinpoint accuracy,

• and under-resourced grassroots organizations have the tools they need to organize in their communities at scale.
  

👀  We’re excited to unveil Votivate’s first AI product at Netroots, and even more excited to continue to innovate in community with all of you.

If you want to talk about how AI can scale your organizing efforts and help you reach the multi-racial working class, let’s talk (:

You should be using Hex 🔮

Believe it or not, this is not a paid post—I just really like this tool.

I think I’m known in the field for being an ardent dbt fan, but what people don’t know is that Hex is far and above my favorite analytics tool.

If you’re unfamiliar with Hex, it’s essentially a supercharged Jupyter Notebook where you can write SQL and Python together in one tool and publish your analysis as a beautiful, interactive app for your non-technical colleagues. Some of my favorite features of Hex are the ease with which you can churn out a stunning report with a few clicks of a button, their slick query editor that lets you write SQL against your data warehouse and pandas data frames, and a dbt integration that blends my two favorite tools.

My good friends at Hex recently launched Hex 3.0 and wow. Wowee. Holy shit.

Among many of their product updates, Hex unveils a suite of new AI tools. I think Hex gets AI for data analysis exactly right. We don’t want to automate away data analysis—I fundamentally believe that AI will not replace the expertise of data analysts. Instead, Hex gives data analysts superpowers with its suite of AI magic tools. What I like most about these tools is that their AI is suggesting code that you can verify and test—you still need talented data analysis to verify the output of the AI.

Hex’s AI magic tools include…

• Text to SQL prompting that actually works

• Generate complex Python code

• A co-pilot that can take you from nothing to a full-fledged visualization in seconds

• Auto-fix that identifies the error in your code and auto-suggests the solution

I don’t get to write much code in my new role anymore, but when I was Hex was always the first tool I reached for. I hope you give it a try for yourself—I would love to hear what you think of it.

What I’ve been reading/listening to 📕

• Speaking of Hex, I really liked their grounded take on whether AI would automate away all the data jobs. As AI makes data analysis easier, Hex believes that it will only increase the demand for data analytics, a la Jevon’s paradox.

• We’re in Micah Sifry’s newsletter about AI tech for political campaigns! Yes it’s from January, but it mentioned the Votivate AI tool we’re demoing at Netroots this upcoming week. I empathize with Sifry’s concerns about the perils of unleashing AI-driven individualized voter contact messaging, and one of the reasons I’m so excited about building WF Labs is to bring together the ethics, practitioner, and policy expertise from across the field to ensure that our technology is used for good.

• On the topic of use cases for AI in progressive politics, I really like Ben Packer’s idea for building an AI note-taking extractor/synthesizer tool. Ben and I agree that one of AI’s best use cases in politics is automating some of the admin work and data minutiae of organizing. Also if you haven’t perused Ben’s website, it’s fantastic.

• I’ve been interested in the question of which jobs specifically are at risk of being automated away by AI. Shout out to Roy Bahat for sending along this research paper that outlines that while AI will replace much knowledge work, at the moment, we don’t anticipate any job being fully replaced by AI.

• Lenny Mendonca writes a powerful essay about AI for good. In it, he argues that AI has been shaped by market forces with minimal government intervention to date but that the government could play a larger role in shaping AI’s role in the healthcare and education to “fuel innovation, enhance competitiveness, boost productivity, and improve public-sector efficiency

• In the vein of labor in AI, I really enjoyed this podcast about how AI can be leveraged to build worker power and facilitate worker organizing.

What I’ve cooked recently 🍳

That’s all for this week,

brittany bennett, tech and data person

P.S. Slide into my DMs if you want to get coffee or drinks at Netroots!