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AI-powered platforms train bots to sound like political candidates in text messages while conducting personalized conversations with thousands of potential voters. The bots also collect data, learn what each voter wants from their representatives and use that information to shape future campaign messages.
Aaron Sheeks, the CEO of Akillion, an AI platform that allows people to run their own large language models, or bots, said many of his current customers are running for political office.
“Our goal is to put the microphone back in the hands of the voter,” Sheeks said. “We’re giving agencies and political campaigns the ability to have a trained AI person who can go back and forth and answer questions about police reform or education or tax changes.”
Some in the broader political texting industry say generative AI’s ability to answer voter questions and collect data about their concerns will be revolutionary for campaigns; Others say political text messaging is a limited — and annoying — tool and that using AI won’t improve it. While it’s difficult to determine how many campaigns are using generative AI to send text messages to voters this election cycle, experts say Republicans have adapted to AI more quickly than Democrats.
“I think it will make campaigns more interactive, more responsive and more personalized,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican strategist and director of the Center for Campaign Innovation, a nonprofit that encourages conservative campaigns to adopt new technologies. He said that generative AI “helps campaigns do more with less.”
In almost all cases, the first text message sent to voters is written and sent by a human, Wilson said. The AI intervenes when the recipient interacts.
The era of long-form political text messages is over, said Tom Carroll, CEO of Convos, an AI-powered text messaging platform. Convos guides campaigns and their bots to say a sentence, introduce themselves, and then ask a question to start a conversation.
“What we’re offering is the greatest volunteer you’ve ever had,” Carroll said. “You will respond within 30 seconds in any language and directly address the question the person is asking.”
Convos launched last year, Carroll said, and helped with 10 political campaigns. This year they want to work with over 100 campaigns; So far they have achieved about half of this goal.
Marty Santalucia, a partner at Vector Political, which focuses on text messaging with generative AI, said bots excel at engaging voters and “in some cases people talk to our agent for hours.” About 5-10% of people respond to text messages and about 10-20% of them engage in 10 or more text messages.
“We sent two and a half million text messages this year and had over 20,000 to 30,000 conversations,” Santalucia said. “We are listening to a degree that campaigns have never done before.”
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The rise of campaign SMS
The political text messaging market grew sharply in 2020 as candidates struggled to connect with grassroots voters, said Josh Justice, the CEO of Peerly, a peer-to-peer text messaging platform. Live phone calls and phone banking declined as landlines died out. Door-to-door canvassing became outdated as people became suspicious of opening the door to strangers. And on social media, the relationship between candidates and voters is in the hands of the technology platform.
Justice expects every single House or Senate campaign to send text messages this year because it is one of the few ways to reach voters directly and en masse. It stays on voters’ phones and doesn’t have to compete with the algorithm for attention.
Justice and others who work for traditional political texting companies said they have ethical concerns about generative political texting via AI. AI can be used to analyze data or guide volunteers, he said, but campaigns should immediately show voters that they are talking to compelling bots.
“I don’t think it’s ethical to use generative AI to communicate with voters,” Justice said. “You can put a disclaimer in there and that will make it a lot better. But that defeats the purpose of what everyone did initially.”
He is particularly concerned about campaigns that exploit this while laws regulating AI are still being enacted. Campaigns in North Dakota and California must tell recipients whether they are speaking to virtual assistants in their first message. Campaigns in New Jersey may soon have to disclose when they use generative AI to provide election-related information to voters.
Nathan Rifkin, co-CEO of Scale to Win, a technology company that runs grassroots organizing and fundraising for progressives, said the risks of using generative AI outweigh the benefits, including the fact that the chatbot provides false information.
“Or you can make AI chatbots say some pretty terrible things,” Rifkin said. “If that’s in the candidate’s voice, it can lead to bad consequences.”
Tech companies that sell generative AI text messages to political candidates say their customers are not interested in going public. That’s partly because candidates don’t want to reveal their “secret sauce,” said Vector Political’s Marty Santalucia. He also acknowledges that another aspect is that “it is very unclear as to the public perception of this instrument”.
A Pew Research Center survey found that Democrats have less confidence in the government’s ability to effectively regulate AI than Republicans. Democratic campaigns are more reluctant to try new technologies, while Republican campaigns are more experimental, Santalucia said.
Wilson, who trains Republican campaign strategists and candidates on adopting AI, believes the difference between the campaigns could be that the two policy debates surrounding AI — its environmental footprint and its impact on labor and unions — run counter to Democratic politics.
“We just don’t have that on the right side,” Wilson said. “We’re focused on winning with the tools we have.”
The platform could be the problem
Stefanie Party, 44, moved back to Cleveland, Ohio, from Chile last year and that’s when the political messages began, often of a clickbait-like nature, sometimes up to five a day. They made her “super, super annoyed,” she said.
“You really can’t tell who they’re coming from,” Party said. “Even when I talk to an AI that claims to give me good or personalized information, I really have no idea who is on the other side.”
Jessica Alter, co-founder and chairwoman of Tech for Campaigns, a political nonprofit that helps Democrats adopt data and digital marketing techniques, said data shows that political text messaging used to work until it became abused through overuse.
While text messaging can still be useful for increasing voter turnout and AI generative texting could be helpful, Alter said AI is best suited to finding new and measurable ways to connect with people.
“I don’t think AI is best suited to saving channels that people already hate,” Alter said, referring to text messages from political campaigns. “It’s best for finding new ways to do things and finding new ways to reach people.”
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/12/nx-s1-5867763/ai-artificial-intelligence-data-texts-bots-voters-campaigns
