Center for Policy Design and Governance

Research to Practice Brief Series

Using an AI Chatbot to Improve Access to Lake Skaneateles Watershed Regulations

Lucas Colleluori and Tomás Olivier

May 2026

Tomás Olivier

Center for Policy Research

Research to Practice Brief Series

Artificial Intelligence

New York State

Water

Tomás Olivier

The Lake Skaneateles watershed, a critical drinking water source for the City of Syracuse, is governed by a patchwork of state, county, and local regulations. Navigating these interdependent rules is a persistent challenge for researchers, policymakers, and local stakeholders. This report explores whether a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbot can make complex watershed regulations more accessible. To do so, we built a chatbot that incorporates the relevant state, county, and local regulations affecting the Lake Skaneateles watershed. Results show the potential of this approach for reducing the complexity of navigating interdependent regulatory corpora and improving the speed and accuracy of regulatory queries for policy design and implementation.

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