HELLO FUTURE: How AI Is Rewiring Lobbying and Policy Work

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Nowadays, everybody in Washington, DC is talking about artificial intelligence
and how it's rewriting the rules of America and the
global order. But what about how it's actually reshaping how
a bill becomes a law, and how the ecosystem around
legislation and around government affairs is really turned upside down.
Hello Future, it's me keV. This is a dispatch from
the Digital Frontier. The planet is Earth. The year is
twenty twenty six. My name is Kevin Surrilli. You can
get all of the latest news on the future at
MTF dot News, and be sure to subscribe to the
Hello Future podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and on
the iHeartMedia app. My guest today is David Fuscus. He
is the CEO and founder of PRECISAI, which makes industry
specific AI platforms. It was founded all the way back
in twenty twenty two, and they've just launched Preess public
relations last year with customers in fourteen countries. We're going
to get into all of that, but what really struck me, David,
welcome to the program. About what you're doing is you've
just launched this new Willard AI which is specifically built
for Washington DC's ecosystem, talking about lobbyist, hillstaffers, lawmakers themselves, policymakers,
the whole ecosystem. And so I guess you you're a
titan who's been around in the public affairs world for decades.
I mean you've had've had.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Five years, yeah, thirty five years.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
So along comes artificial intelligence, and how would you describe
the seismic shift that the public relations community has undergone,
specifically here in Washington. And then you jumped in and
created a presis in DC.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
You know, there's two things public affairs is pr on
one hand, that supports you know, lobbying efforts and lobby
and overall AI is in the middle of transforming all
of that. There are some challenges, quite frankly, is there
is a good bit of distrust for sensitive tasks among
the lobbying and policy community, not just lobbyists, but you know,
hill staffers and others. But it used to be that
in Washington, you know, lobbying policy work, a big part
of it was who you know, it's handshakes, conversations in
the hallway. And this is AI has really taking it
and turning it into it's about information, about the accuracy
of information, the depth of information and the speed by
which you can get it.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Well, I remember we were I think we were at
Martin's Tavern and Georgetown years ago now maybe at more
than a year ago, and you were telling me about
scraper bots, and it was like the first time someone
had explained to me what a digital scraper bot is.
And I just remember thinking to myself, all of these
public affair shops, the lobbying firms that hire these young
guns out of school to go up and be the
first to get the report that gets filed, or the
legislation bill that gets dropped, or the amendment on the
floor that gets dropped, or even like a draft of it.
All of that is now able to the second it hits.
If you know where to look and you've got the
tech to find it, you're able to find it. That's all.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Artificial intelligence listen AI gets information in two ways. One
is through scraping information. And it's not just us that
have scraping bots, there's millions of them that are out there.
You scrape information, or you connect directly into databases to
get the real deal, to actually get the information that
you can't just scrape off the website and the challenge
with models like Claude and chat, GPT and Gemini and
the big ones that everybody uses. It's got two types
of information. What's trained into it and then what it
can go find via Google. And when it goes from
find stuff at Google, it's scrape stuff if it's published
on a website. If it's right on a website, it'll
get it. However, buried in a database, like so much
government information is, it doesn't get that. It can't get that,
which makes it very frustrating to use AI through legislation
because overall you're not sure that you're getting all the
information that you that you need. And this, this, this
challenge is why we built, why we built Willard.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
I remember a couple of months ago, there was that
study that came out that said AI is changing how
humans talk? How is it changing how politicians govern and
how their teams function, and how the world around politicians operates.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
On the policy level, AI is changing, it's taking away
a lot of the drudgery work. I'll give you an
example of this. Remember the big beautiful bill from last year.
That's something called a budget reconciliation.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Depends how beautiful it is, depending on politics. Is my
old life, David. But I will say it depends on
who you ask. Just how big and beautiful that bill is.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah, yeah, there's no question about it. But you know,
when I used to work on the hill, we call
it a Christmas tree. Right, you can hang anything on it, you.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Know, everybody loves So let's.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Put homeland homeland security funding on it. Let's put a
highway project on it. It's a big you know, it's
a big Christmas tree. It's not going into all the details.
When a bill like that, a budget reconci has dropped,
it's usually dropped two days before, three days before it's
going to be considered. It's a thousand plus pages. Just
going through and analyzing that and reading it and figuring
out what's in it and how it impacts them is
something that legions of lobbyists, you know, work on, their
younger staffers, their research people that work on well, all
of that can be done now in just a matter
of minutes using AI to organize and go through the information.
It really is transformative.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
I think that's the good thing. And I'm an optimist
about all of this. And you've launched Willard, which I
want to talk about in a second. But I think
that's an optimistic and hopeful message because especially when it
comes to transparency and how government funding gets spent and allocated.
I mean, these are all great, great things, which I
think is great. At the same time, it's Washington, and
if you don't know the folks, I think that you're
still going to have to have the personal relationships and
the history of understanding the history of the lawmakers and
their relationships and whatnot. But I do think that overall
it will be able to help us provide some more
transparency and accountability ultimately. But what I find fascinating is
when I came to Washington about thirteen years ago as
a reporter at Politico, I was dubbed a hill rat
as what they call us, because I would be in
the halls of Rayburn or Willard Berkson and I would
just stand there with my cell phone, which was my microphone,
and put it in front of folks to record the
quotes from after the Senate Banking or the House Financial
Services Committee hearings. And I don't think AI can replace that,
but I do think that if you're a communicator, whether
that's a journalist or whether that's a lobbyist, or a yes, folks,
lobbyists are communicators as well, or public affairs specialist or
you work for a principle, even I do think that
AI is going to be able to help arm you
and educate you way way faster. But you have to
make sure that it's scraping the right material, that has
access to the right domains, that it's not being infiltrated
by a hostile foreign actor. So with that said, I
know you put a lot of time into building Willard.
Tell me about First of all, where does the name
come from, and how it's basically monitoring government?

Speaker 2 (07:22):
So the name Willard. Our offices are two blocks from
the Willard Hotel. And as the story goes, when ulysses
Us Grant was President of the US, he used to
take a walk every afternoon and he'd go to the
to the lobby of what was then called Willard's Hotel
and sit in the lobby and smoke a cigar. And
there were petitioners they called that would come up and
ask him this, I need this, my kid needs a job, whatever.
So President Grant started calling them lobbyists. And it's for
the term lobbyists. Come.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
I never knew that. Wait, I love that that is
such a great story. And by the way, the Willard
Hotel is one of my favorite places in Washington, d C.
I don't think you can still smoke, which I do
partake in in the lobby anymore, but I wish we could.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
But no, it's not going to replace lobbyists. It's not
going to replace people that do policy work. It's not
going to replace kill staff. These are just very powerful
tools that are going to change the way in which
they work. So it's really not replacing the lobbyist. It's
replacing the lobbyists reading pile and research pile information because
in the end, successful lobby and successful policy work is
a combination of two things. It's the expertise and the
intellectual capabilities of the people are that are working, and
the other thing is the information. And there's so much
information out there. Willard sits on top of We've built
the world's largest database of AI accessible government documents. We
are tapped into one hundred and thirty two different federal
government and congressional databases, and that's millions and millions and
millions of documents that go there. And so for that information,
something that goes into those databases and finds what you
need and then pulls it back out the primary source documents,
not just things that it's reading on websites.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
I think that's really the future is niche custom tailor
designs functions that help people, because to your point, you
can go on one of the major lms and it's
sometimes it's maddening. I mean, I didn't know I could
get angry at a robot until this year, when the
thing is just giving you gibberish, you know, And so
I think to be able to have a tool like that,
I mean, give me an example of what a government
affairs team or even a hill staffer, how would they
deploy that technology that would candidly take them weeks in
the past, but now would take them like a minute.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
There's a lot of examples of this. I'll give you
a couple of specific examples that we've built. We've got
one tool on Willard, which is an amendment impact analyzer.
So if you're in subcommittee or committee or on the floor,
there can be a lot of amendments and trying to
figure out what is that amendment actually going to do
to the bill, and if that bill passes, what's it
going to do to the law. What impact is that
going to have on clients or on constituent groups. You know,
figuring all of that out is very difficult, but AI
helps do that and do it very very quickly. But
the one caveat here is that inaccuracy is and hallucination.
So an inaccuracy is when it makes a factual mistake,
and hallucination is when it just makes a bunch of
stuff up. And it's very difficult for policy people because
listen in Washington. You know, chatbot that makes things up
in DC is worthless to a certain extent whe wrong
citation and you're done. The whole game is getting good
grounded information from primary sources and then going through some
things that you can do to fact check the chat bots.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
So I want to come back to hallucinating, but I
still want to get back to this point of just
how you've been through very different technology revolutions. Everyone has,
all of our listeners, myself included. I mean, we're living
through I always say this the start of the fifth
industrial revolutions. So get used to the change, because it's
just going to keep changing. I mean, quantum computing is coming.
But I do think someone with your background, i'd be
very curious to kind of help us put it in
perspective for a second. Because thirty five years ago you're
in the back rooms. You've got the cigar smoke rooms
and the handshake deals and everything, and that was lobbying.
Then this thing called the personal computer came then with email,
which allowed for communication time to be cut down. Then
you obviously have the Internet and GPS and mobile computing
and cell phones, I mean, and that dramatically impacted things.
AI is now this big shift, and I think one
of my takeaways from what I've heard from you is
that you still need the lobbyist, but the relationship of
how the lobbyist engages with the information candidly will be
able to in fluents even faster. If the analysis and
the trusted data is coming faster, that's going to evolve
the culture of Washington.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
You're always going to need the lobbyists and the people
that support lobbyists on this. You know, the best way
to think of it is you've got a hill staff
or a legislative director on the hill, or you've got
a lobbyist or whoever it is, and you hand them
a little box, right, a little box of AI. They
go into a phone booth. Not many of those around
left anymore. It comes out, you know, superman or superwoman
on this. It just levels up your skills that lets
you concentrate on the most meaningful work that you can do.
The research and the analysis of information on that is
just so much easier now with It's so much easier
now with with with AI. What we're seeing is, you know,
early on in AI, the predictions where there's mass layoffs
and last job placement. You know, we're not seeing that
or the other product in the PR industry, we're not
seeing that. They're not seeing that at all. What we're
seeing is people are much more effective in their work.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
And what I love about, what I deeply respect about
you is that you saw the shift happening and you
didn't buy into the doom and gloom. You said no,
I mean because you also run Xenophone Strategies, which is
a global public affairs firm, and your career in these industries.
I mean, what you've done for aerospace. I mean, folks
go onto his LinkedIn and see what he's been up to.
I mean, it's it's really really But what I deeply
respect is you saw this shift coming and you said,
I'm not afraid by this. Let's freaking go. Let's build
a model. Let's build an AI, let's embrace the technology,
Let's build a business model around it. Let's keep up
and lead in the pace of the technology revolution. And
that's really the only way to keep living and to
keep evolving. So I deeply respect that. David Fuscus, the
CEO and founder of precis AI, I want to have
you back on to talk about hallucinating because I think
a lot of folks think politicians are already hallucinating. So
David Fuscas, CEO and founder of Priest to say, I
go check them out. Uh, And David, thank you so
much for showing up to meet the future. Have a
great tomorrow. The day