What to know about Trump strategist’s embrace of AI to help conservatives

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Brad Parscale was the digital guru behind Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 election and was promoted to manage the 2020 campaign. But he didn’t last long on that job: His personal life unraveled in public and he later texted a friend that he felt “guilty” for helping Trump win after the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

He’s since become an evangelist about the power of artificial intelligence to transform how Republicans run political campaigns. And his company is working for Trump’s 2024 bid, trying to help the presumptive Republican nominee take back the White House from Democratic President Joe Biden.

Here’s what to know about Parscale and his new role:

NEW AI-POWERED CAMPAIGN TOOLS

Parscale says his company, Campaign Nucleus, can use AI to help generate customized emails, parse oceans of data to gauge voter sentiment and find persuadable voters. It can also amplify the social media posts of “anti-woke” influencers, according to an Associated Press review of Parscale’s public statements, his company documents, slide decks, marketing materials and other records not previously made public.

Soon, Parscale says, his company will deploy an app that harnesses AI to assist campaigns in collecting absentee ballots in the same way drivers for DoorDash or Grubhub pick up dinners from restaurants and deliver them to customers.

FROM UNKNOWN TO TRUMP CONFIDANT

Parscale was a relatively unknown web designer in San Antonio, Texas, when he was hired to build a web presence for Trump’s family business.

That led to a job on the future president’s 2016 campaign. He was one of its first hires and spearheaded an unorthodox digital strategy, teaming up with scandal-plagued Cambridge Analytica to help propel