Iowa Legislature used AI program for 2025 session as more states consider its adoption

DES MOINES — As the use of artificial intelligence expands into new aspects of society, a new use was found in at least one high-profile place in Iowa this year: the Iowa State Capitol Building.

During this year’s session, the Iowa House of Representatives and the governor’s office used an Iowa-based AI-native program to help streamline the legislative process for evaluating and tracking bills, a first for the state.

Iowa is one of the first states to use AI in the legislative process, alongside California and Utah. A slate of other states are considering adopting similar programs.

The program, Legible, was created by Zack Krawiec and Kasey Clary, founders of the technology company Upvote. Krawiec and Clary met as pages in the Iowa Legislature in 2014 before clerking for House lawmakers, where they saw how policy was crafted.

Krawiec said that experience helped them gain an understanding of how the legislative process worked and how monitoring and policy analysis systems could be made more efficient.

“I spent quite a bit of time understanding and working within the information ecosystem and state politics, specifically in Iowa, so I really had a good feel for some of the frustrations that existed for folks in that space,” Krawiec said. “We decided to come together and start playing around with potential solutions for those problems.”

Clary pursued a career in software and product management and Krawiec got his law degree at Drake University before they came back together in 2022 to create a news aggregation program. The program was designed to find and communicate relevant policy-related news at a state level and deliver it to people based on which part of the state they were in to see what policy issues at the Capitol would impact them.

They found it difficult to commercialize the software, but they noticed that lobbyists started signing up for the program. They realized people who worked in the Capitol wanted a system to simplify legislative tracking, so they pivoted to creating Legible.

Legible was used by House caucus staff during the 2025 session for analysis of documents and bills, tracking legislation, and streamlining other aspects of the legislative workflow.

The Iowa House Republican and Democratic caucuses and the governor’s office declined to comment for this article.

How it works

One feature of the program, named “bill chat,” allows users to "talk" with legislative documents, ask questions and fact-check to better understand bills. The program also provides a workflow for staff to keep track of bills in both chambers and track them through the legislative process, which Krawiec said saved staff a significant amount of time, especially during a session that saw more than 2,000 pieces of legislation introduced.

“The work being done by caucus staff and research staff and legislative services agencies is just insane. Throughout the legislative session, these folks are working crazy hours purely because the current tech is a little bit outdated, and legislative machinery tends to being heavy in procedure and making it difficult to sometimes get all of the information in one place,” Krawiec said. “To the extent that we're able to help, I think that there's a lot of quality of life for folks that work in the space that can be added, as well as, ultimately, better work product.”

Beyond the Iowa Legislature, Upvote has picked up other clients, including legislative liaisons for different agencies, multiclient lobbyists and trade associations. The program also is being used by municipalities in a number of other states, including Illinois, Arizona, Georgia and Nebraska.

Krawiec says the company hopes the Iowa Legislature decides to renew the contract with the company for the next session.

Implications of AI for Iowa and other states

While the Iowa Legislature used an AI-based program in its legislative process for the first time this session, many states are finding other ways to incorporate AI into their legislative branches.

Will Clark, a program principal for the National Conference of State Legislature’;s Center for Legislative Strengthening, surveyed legislative staffers across the country last year about whether they use AI to aid their work. Clark said some already are using multiple AI applications, including Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT and Google Gemini for research, legislative tracking, analysis and early bill drafting.

According to the 2024 survey, 20 percent of surveyed legislative staffers and workers said they are currently using AI, while 42 percent said their offices are considering using it. Clark added that while the use of AI in state capitols is growing, most opinion still is mixed on adopting the technology.

“Legislatures are open to using these new tools, but I think they really want some assurances, especially with confidentiality, privacy, and then making sure, again, that any kind of protections are in contracts,” Clark said. “They're waiting for maybe a kind of stasis moment where a little more is known about these tools, about how they're used in the institution, and then they can craft policies based on that.”

Sean McSpaden, principal legislative IT analyst with the Oregon Legislature, said they are piloting the use of Microsoft Co-Pilot in the legislature, as staff are already using AI-based programs.

“The trend lines say that regardless of branch and state government, our employees are using these tools, whether we know it or not, whether they're authorized or not, and so it's really important for the organization to be proactive on this front,” McSpaden said. “We're all in the environment of bring your own AI, we have employees that, if they don't have these tools provided to them, they're going to bring their own.”

While he thinks AI “shows great promise” for streamlining legislative work and making the legislature more accessible for the public through transcribing, translating and summarizing public meetings, McSpaden added that states should have guardrails in place to ensure accuracy in research and analysis.

“Again, that kind of that trifecta of some sort of governance and oversight, some sort of policy or guardrails, and then workforce development and training to make sure our technical staff and our non-technical staff become more and more aware of these tools, how they can be used for good, and how, if we're not careful, they can be used for bad,” he said.

Iowa has guidance on the government's use of generative AI. The policy developed by the Iowa Department of Management outlines guidance for generative AI use by state employees, including provisions prohibiting the use of sensitive and protected data in AI programs and requiring human evaluation and interaction for any finalized output from AI technologies.

McSpaden said transparency around AI use in government is essential to maintaining public trust in the systems, as people still are adjusting to its integration into society.

Initially, there was some hesitancy around using the program in the Iowa Legislature, but it faded as caucus staff interacted with it more, Krawiec said.

“We haven't really found anything that would be considered a pure inaccuracy throughout the legislative session on our platform this year, which I think helped build a lot of trust," he said. "But that said, you know, we were pretty straightforward with everyone where it's like, ‘Hey, this is a tool at this point. It's not a replacement for your expertise or understanding.’”