Looking back at 2025, one thing stands out clearly. it was a year of consolidation, international outreach and intellectual maturation around a single, demanding question: how parliaments can responsibly integrate artificial intelligence without undermining democratic values.
Throughout the year, my work focused on research, publishing and extensive engagement with parliaments, universities and international organizations across Europe, the Americas and beyond. AI seems no longer to be a future issue for legislatures. It is a present institutional challenge.
Research focus
In 2025, my research activities continued to explore the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and parliamentary institutions, with particular emphasis on real-world applicability for the Hellenic Parliament and other legislative systems. A key area of inquiry concerned the strategic integration of AI into parliamentary infrastructures, including early discussions on the potential role of national and European high-performance computing ecosystems, such as the Greek AI Factory Pharos. The core insight was straightforward but crucial: infrastructure alone is not enough. Meaningful AI adoption in parliaments requires governance frameworks, staff training, ethical safeguards and sustained international cooperation. This work was supported by the Hellenic OCR Team, academic partners and young researchers. The latter is an investment not only in outputs, but also in capacity-building for the next generation of parliamentary experts.
Publications
2025 was also a productive year in terms of publications, contributing to both academic literature and practitioner-oriented outputs. A milestone was the Greek edition of the WFD Guidelines for AI in Parliaments,. This work translated the established international framework into the Greek context, addressing ethics, transparency, accountability and institutional readiness. These are issues now central to any parliamentary AI governance scheme.
Beyond this, several peer-reviewed articles explored:
- the reliability of large language models in legal interpretation, using EU VAT law as a case study,
- the opportunities and risks of AI for parliamentary democracy in the context of the EU AI Act and the Council of Europe’s AI Convention (in Greek),
- and crowdsourcing and civic technology as building blocks of the digital parliament drawing on a decade of experience from the Hellenic OCR Team.
Conferences and lectures
If 2025 had a defining feature, it was mobility, intellectual and geographic. Over the course of the year, I delivered dozens of lectures, keynote speeches and panel interventions at international conferences, parliamentary hearings and academic institutions. These ranged from highly technical workshops on AI for legislation (JURIX, Legal Informatics) to high-level political discussions in national parliaments and international organizations (ECLAC).
Important activities included:
- interventions at parliaments in Belgium, Poland, Albania, Argentina, Northern Ireland, and Ukraine,
- lectures at institutions such as LUISS School of Government, the University of the Aegean and major international summer schools,
- contributions to global forums organized by the Council of Europe, ECLAC, Bússola Tech, IFLA and Westminster Foundation for Democracy,
- and participation in interdisciplinary debates on trust, accountability, AI safety and democratic legitimacy.
These engagements confirmed something I have observed repeatedly: despite different legal traditions and political cultures, parliaments across the world are grappling with strikingly similar questions about AI.
The highlight
A special moment of the year was the 4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies, held in Athens in June 2025. Co-organizing the conference and delivering the opening address offered a rare opportunity to bring together scholars and practitioners from multiple continents to reflect on the future of parliamentary democracy. The conference (and its published Book of Abstracts) captured a field in transition, where digital transformation, AI and democratic resilience are no longer peripheral topics, but core research agendas.
A year of maturity
What made 2025 distinctive was not technological enthusiasm, but conceptual clarity (at least in most occasions). Across research, publications and public interventions, the emphasis was consistently put on:
- institutional realism rather than experimentation for its own sake,
- democratic safeguards rather than efficiency alone,
- and long-term capacity-building rather than quick technological fixes.
In that sense, 2025 was less about announcing the future and more about laying down the intellectual and institutional conditions under which AI can genuinely serve parliamentary democracy.
Looking ahead to 2026
For 2026, we are preparing several important contributions including books, edited volumes and multiple research articles examining AI governance frameworks and parliamentary modernization in general. The journey continues as we work to ensure democratic institutions harness technological innovation while preserving their fundamental values and strengthening citizen engagement. As always, I am grateful for the collaboration with researchers, institutions and parliaments worldwide who share our commitment to advancing parliamentary democracy in the digital age.
***************