The Legislative Assembly of the Azores will take part in the sixth LegisTech Forum in Washington, D.C., from September 22 to 25. Secretary-General Sandra Costa will present the regional Parliament’s digital transformation work and its arrIAga artificial-intelligence project alongside representatives of legislatures from around the world.
Parliaments have always been houses of words. Laws are written, amended and preserved; debates become records; decisions enter archives and, over time, archives become the institutional memory of democracy. For centuries, that memory lived principally on paper. Today, an entirely different question has entered legislative chambers: what happens when machines can search, organize, connect and interpret enormous bodies of parliamentary knowledge almost instantaneously? From September 22 to 25, the Azorean Parliament will take that question from an Atlantic archipelago to Washington, D.C., participating in an international conversation about how democracy should enter the age of artificial intelligence.
The Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region of the Azores will be represented at the sixth LegisTech Forum by its Secretary-General, Sandra Costa. Organized by Bússola Tech, the Organization of American States, the U.S. House of Representatives and the American Governance Institute, the gathering brings parliamentary officials, legislative administrators and technology specialists from numerous jurisdictions together at the U.S. House and the OAS. Its agenda extends well beyond acquiring new software: artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, parliamentary data, interoperability, institutional memory and the governance of emerging technologies are being treated as questions about the resilience and integrity of legislatures themselves.
The Azorean contribution begins with a deceptively profound question: should parliamentary procedures simply be reproduced inside digital systems? On September 22, inside the U.S. House of Representatives, Costa will join representatives from Kenya, the United States and the technology sector in the panel “Beyond Digitisation: Should Legislative Processes Simply Be Replicated in Digital Systems?” The distinction matters. Modernization should not mean taking every inherited bureaucratic practice and giving it a screen. Some procedures embody constitutional safeguards, transparency and institutional memory and must be preserved; others may exist largely because older technologies required them. The challenge is to know which is which.
The Azores will return to the program on September 24 with something more concrete. Costa is scheduled to present “Knowledge-Augmented AI in Parliament: Building Trusted and Context-Aware Legislative Services,” showcasing the work associated with arrIAga, the ALRAA project designed to apply artificial intelligence to parliamentary knowledge. Its significance lies in the concept of an AI enriched by institutional information rather than detached from it: technology capable of helping users navigate legislative material while remaining anchored in the documents, terminology and context of the institution it serves. In parliamentary work, where a misplaced provision, outdated version or invented answer can have consequences far beyond an ordinary search error, reliability is not simply a technological advantage. It is an institutional obligation.
There is something noteworthy in seeing the Parliament of a region of roughly a quarter-million people participating in the same discussions as the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament and legislatures from Africa, Europe, Asia and Latin America. The Forum’s program includes participants from the U.S. House and Senate, Library of Congress, European Parliament, parliaments of Kenya, Ghana, Indonesia, Austria, Greece, Italy, Pakistan, South Africa, Mexico and several other countries. Digital transformation alters an old assumption about scale: innovation does not necessarily have to travel from the largest institutions toward the smallest. A small parliament can experiment, develop expertise and contribute lessons to institutions many times its size.
Yet the deeper question is not whether artificial intelligence can make a parliament faster. It almost certainly can. The important question is whether it can help make parliamentary information more accessible without making democratic responsibility more distant. Algorithms may retrieve precedents, connect legislation, organize archives and assist research. They cannot assume political responsibility for a law. They cannot replace public scrutiny, parliamentary judgment or the obligation of an elected representative to answer to citizens. Indeed, the LegisTech Forum itself places considerable emphasis on responsible AI, data protection, cybersecurity and preserving procedural integrity alongside innovation.
For the Azores, there is an appealing historical symmetry in this journey. The archipelago spent centuries overcoming distance: first through ships, then telegraph cables, radio, aviation and digital networks. Now one of its democratic institutions is confronting another kind of distance—the immense space between information and understanding.
The papers of yesterday became the databases of today. Tomorrow, artificial intelligence may help us converse with the accumulated memory of institutions.
But democracy will still depend upon something no machine can automate: citizens trusting that the words spoken, laws written and decisions made in their name remain accountable to them.
That is where technology must serve Parliament—and where Parliament must continue to serve people.
Based on a Press Release from the Azorean Parliament. The photo is from the U.S. House of Representatives.