Stakeholder Engagement That Doesn’t Suck: Who Gets a Say—and Who Benefits—from the AI Buildout?

Nov 9

This recap comes from Stakeholder Engagement That Doesn’t Suck: Who Gets a Say—and Who Benefits—from the AI Buildout?, a hands-on working session presented by The Sidebar during UNGA / Climate Week 2026 in New York. It was hosted by qb.’s Sam Hartsock, Maha Khan, and Carly Ferro, and shaped by everyone who brought their experience, questions, and ideas into the room. For the bigger picture, read our companion piece, America Is Building Big Things Again. Have We Learned Anything?

At qb., our work is built around helping organizations make better decisions with the people affected by them. Explore our work at qb.

published 11.9.26

The AI buildout is moving extraordinarily fast. Community knowledge can make it better, but only if it reaches decision-makers while those decisions can still change.

We started with Michelle MiJung Kim’s forthcoming six-node framework of the AI supply chain and zoomed in on Node 2: hardware manufacturing and data centers. But what we learned, and the questions we identified, apply across all six.

Infrastructure within and near communities isn’t new. The opportunity is in how it gets done from here: what has made engagement productive, what has made it go wrong, and how we move from development that shapes a place to development shaped by a place and its people.

One thing to know up front: this wasn’t an anti-AI conversation. The commitment in the room was to changing how AI gets built, not stopping it. Usually, the people showing up are just trying to get into a conversation that’s happening without them.

Five things we learned together

1. Communities are being treated as a box to tick, not a source of intelligence.

Not enough engagement is happening, and not with the right people. When it does happen, lived expertise gets collected rather than used in decision-making. Most communities have seen this before, so the practical question is how to build trust in a trust-deficit environment.

2. How do you know who the “right” stakeholders are?

This came up again and again. Frameworks help, but the answer sits within the community itself, and “the community” is never one thing.

Two tools help surface the people a standard stakeholder list misses. Community mapping asks who lives, works, worships, gathers, and relies on this place, and who has been part of the conversation so far. Power mapping asks who holds decision-making authority, who influences them, and who to reach first.

3. Accountability shouldn’t land on the people already carrying the harm.

Residents are already overburdened. The group preferred independent monitoring of company commitments by nonprofit partners, elected governing committees, or a mixed group of community leaders. Community benefit agreements (CBAs) can make those commitments enforceable.

Transparency is a major bottleneck, and government holds much of it, from forcing disclosure to making sure people know a town hall is happening. Civil society can pressure government to use that power. Companies can report against standard frameworks with third-party validation, the way they do everywhere else.

“People can handle hard news, limits, and tradeoffs. What they don’t forgive is feeling misled or left out.”

It’s worse when government reinforces it. Trust breaks fastest when access and influence run through political favor.

4. Engagement has a full lifecycle, and it doesn’t stop when the project starts.

One participant put it well: what if the community knew that in three months, the company would take their input and change its operations to address their concerns? How would that shift the way they show up?

Participation shifts when people trust their voice has a path to action. And trust holds even when the answer is “this part is fixed, this part is open.”

5. Community opposition is slowing projects down, which makes engagement a financing question.

Reputation and reliability sit close to a company’s financial security, so sustained opposition shows up as cost and delay. Financing exposure, mandatory disclosure, litigation, media, and regulatory floors all push engagement up the agenda for anyone with something to lose.

Set against the speed of AI adoption, that tension is a practical opening: a reason for people optimizing for velocity to take good engagement seriously.

A tool to take with you: eight questions to ask while decisions can still change

Use these before your next site visit, community meeting, or investment committee.

What is the decision? Be specific.
Who holds the pen? Company? Developer? Utility? County? State? Investor? And who could move the pen?
When does the decision close? Work backward from there, not from your communications calendar.
Who lives with the consequences, specifically? “The community” as a single category hides differences that really matter. Include people outside the usual stakeholder ecosystem, and those who have been consulted before and seen nothing change.
What do they know that you don’t? Treat lived experience as intelligence, not anecdote.
What can their input actually change? Name it. Also name what’s no longer negotiable.
How will people know what happened to their input? Create the traceability loop.
Who is still watching two years from now? Decide how commitments will be measured, independently verified, and revisited, and who pays for people’s participation. (CBAs can include people’s time!)

Our big wish question

What would be different if community longevity were a project success metric?

Did the place hosting it become more economically resilient? Did people gain useful infrastructure, skills, or opportunity? Were environmental burdens reduced or mitigated? Were commitments kept? Does the community have more capacity and agency than it did before?

Why qb. is here

This conversation builds on qb.’s work in stakeholder intelligence, community engagement, and people-first resilience. We help organizations understand what’s changing, hear from the people closest to it, and make better decisions before disagreement becomes crisis.

Keep reading: America Is Building Big Things Again. Have We Learned Anything? + Stakeholder Engagement That Doesn’t Suck + People-First Resilience: A Field Guide

Thank you to everyone who brought their experience, questions, and ideas into the room.