Stories from dembrane’s First User Event
Yesterday, we hosted our first user event at our office in s'Hertogenbosch. We brought together facilitators and participation professionals who use ECHO in their daily work across the Netherlands - from citizen dialogues in municipalities to employee workshops in corporations, to community planning sessions. We wanted to understand how AI can help in these settings when human connection is an essential part of the process. It was great to hear so many real success stories from long term partners on how they transformed their stakeholder conversations with ECHO.
We used ECHO to record and analyse the discussions. So in the spirit of this event, instead of us summarising what we heard, we want to share some of the stories from our long term partners directly with you. Here's what ECHO captured and surfaced from our their conversations:
Hearing from the Experts
"Report writing used to take three times longer than the actual meeting. Now with dembrane, it's done in a fraction of the time, and I can use that saved time to sharpen my analysis and better understand what was really said."
"You can truly focus on the conversation as a facilitator because you know you don't have to take notes as a maniak. You can look people in the eye."
"People are open to this technology when they see it helps them be heard more clearly. The key is transparency—when you explain that it helps capture their input more accurately, they appreciate it.”
"In complex mediations, the same words often mean different things to different groups. dembrane helps us catch these nuances and contradictions we might miss. Like when architects and urban planners both talked about 'garden rooms' but meant completely different things."
"I thought we had reached a clear conclusion, but dembrane flagged: 'At minute 8, there was a comment that doesn't align with the conclusion you've drawn. You might want to look at that again.' That wasn't AI overriding my judgment—it was giving me extra eyes.”
"We had facilitators at each table capture the three main challenges for their region. Within 30 minutes, we could present the collective insights to everyone. A professor who'd been working in community development for 30+ years said he recognised the patterns—that's validation of both accuracy and speed.”
"I write maybe 5% of what I used to write. Just key words that help me remember specific moments. The rest flows naturally because I'm actually present in the conversation.”
"Instead of two half-days, we could do it in one day and get the same quality results. That speaks for itself."
"We've seen participants feel more heard and valued than with traditional methods. They know their words won't get lost.”
"The vision isn't just better meetings—it's making democratic participation more accessible and sustainable. When participation becomes easier, it happens more often.”
Building better together
Yesterday confirmed what we've been seeing in the field: AI works because it handles the parts of working processes everyone dislikes. When organisers spend less time on documentation, they run better sessions. When reports take hours instead of weeks, organisations respond to input faster. When stakeholders know their words are accurately heard, trust increases.
There's something fitting about using ECHO to capture a discussion about ECHO. We are grateful for all the great feedback we received from our users yesterday and look forward to making ECHO even better.
If you want to read more, look at the full report ECHO generated 🌱
The dembrane Team
Built by dembrane in Europe
Published June 18th, 2025
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