This is a key question that we posed to leaders across the urban ecosystem as part of our latest smart city program, Building a People-First, AI-Powered City. This study explores how cities are using AI to meet the needs of citizens and to achieve their social, economic, and sustainability goals.
From public safety and mobility to citizen services, infrastructure, and urban planning, the biggest opportunity is not just faster and more efficient service delivery — it's rethinking how cities operate and drive value to residents. As our research shows, AI can help connect data, departments, and decisions in real time, enabling governments to anticipate needs, allocate resources more intelligently, and design services around people, not silos.
This first article in the series shares perspectives from urban, academic, and business leaders on how AI will transform city services for residents and local businesses.
Building a People-First, AI-Powered City
Rapid advances in AI are transforming how cities operate in every domain of urban living, from mobility and infrastructure to environmental management and citizen services. To investigate these developments, ThoughtLab is conducting a ground-breaking research program, Building a People-First, AI-Powered City. As part of the study, we asked urban, academic, and business leaders to provide their views how AI will drive human-centric transformation across key urban domains.
Question: How are cities reimagining municipal services through AI? Compared with past forces, such as the rise of the automobile and the internet, how profound will the impact of AI be on cities?
Geoffrey Urbach, Product and Partnerships Lead, San Antonio
Cities are still in the very early stages of AI implementation, using generative AI to augment existing staff and improve chatbots rather than fundamentally reimagining service delivery. That's real progress, but it's not transformation.
The most genuinely exciting development, and the one least discussed publicly, is the emergence of internal municipal AI engineers capable of building specialized agents that navigate complex workflows across departments. Government has long been held hostage to institutional knowledge gatekeepers: the one person who knows how a process works. Agentic AI has the potential to encode that knowledge and make it accessible across the organization.
Compared to the automobile or the internet, AI's municipal impact will likely be more profound precisely because it touches the internal machinery of government, not just its physical or informational infrastructure. But that impact depends on getting foundations right first, data quality, governance, and change management. The cities that invest in those now will be positioned to scale when the applications mature.
James Meakin, Global Solutions Marketing Director, Dell Technologies
Cities are beginning to reimagine municipal services by using AI to make government more proactive, more accessible, and more efficient. The most immediate developments are in areas where agencies already generate large amounts of data or operate under constant time pressure, including public safety, transportation and mobility, citizen services, infrastructure operations, and urban planning.
What is especially exciting is that AI allows governments to bring together capabilities that used to operate separately. A city can combine sensor data, video, field inputs, operational systems, and historical records to improve both daily service delivery and strategic planning. That creates a more connected operating model for local government.
The long-term impact of AI on cities could be as profound as the internet, with the potential to reshape decision-making itself—how quickly a city understands conditions, prioritizes action and allocates constrained resources.
Nicole Coughlin, Chief Information, Town of Cary, North Carolina
Communities are beginning to move from reactive government to proactive government.
Instead of waiting for a resident to report a pothole, a missed collection, or a service issue, AI can help identify patterns, predict needs, and enable communities to act sooner. It can help employees summarize information, improve routing, support emergency response, detect infrastructure issues, and make government services easier to access.
What excites me most, though, isn't the technology itself. It's the opportunity to fundamentally rethink how government works. For decades, we've organized government around departments because that's how we've had to operate. AI gives us an opportunity to connect people, processes, and information across departments so we can redesign services around the resident experience instead of organizational charts. I believe that's where the greatest transformation will occur.
Bayan Konirbayev, Chief Digital and AI Officer, Alatau City Authority, Kazakhstan
Cities are moving from one-size-fits-all services to targeted, customised service delivery. Instead of a citizen searching through portals and queues, an AI agent can proactively identify needs–for example, automatically enrolling an elderly resident in snow-removal assistance, reminding a small business about license renewal, or matching a job seeker with municipal training programds.
The most exciting developments are in agentic service orchestration. Municipal agents can now coordinate across agencies, track commitments against service-level agreements, and close feedback loops with citizens and businesses in real time. This turns city government from a passive administrator into an active partner in daily life scenarios.
Just as the automobile reshaped physical space and the internet reshaped information flows, AI will reshape decision-making itself. Its impact is likely to be at least as profound as the internet because it changes not only how citizens access services, but also how those services are designed, delivered, and continuously improved.
Rami Shaheen, Secretary General, the AI Subgroup at Dubai Quality Group, UAE
Municipal services are moving from service delivery to life orchestration. Under the old model, the citizen requests, the municipality responds. The AI model is different: the city anticipates, prevents, and personalizes. Under this new AI-driven approach:
The most exciting development is the rise of the municipal AI brain: an integrated intelligence layer connecting citizens, infrastructure, climate, mobility, safety, energy, water, land use, and social services. Compared with the automobile and the internet, AI may be more profound because the automobile changed city spaces, the internet changed city communication, but AI will change city judgment.
Caryn Herder-Fritz, Managing Strategist, Intel
Cities are reimagining municipal services by embedding AI directly into operations rather than treating it as an afterthefact analytics layer. AI will make mobility more fluid through edgebased traffic optimization, make safety more proactive through agentic video intelligence, and make utilities and healthcare more resilient through proactive monitoring and local optimization of critical systems. Compared to the automobile and the internet, AI's impact is similarly profound but more operational: instead of just changing how people move or access information, it changes how the city's underlying systems behave in real time.
Denys Nazarenko, CIO Advisor, Kyiv City Council, Ukraine
I resist the idea of AI as the next great civilizational force–it won't be used everywhere for everything. Strip away the hype and spectacle and its true face is closer to an idle factory than a miracle–a vast, commoditizing industrial capacity that mostly sits idle, burning water and power to keep itself cooled whether or not it's doing anything useful.
Over time, I think it narrows to two classes of use in a city. The first is use revolves around the interpretation of the data our existing sensors and digital public infrastructure already produce, mostly for public safety. The second is flipping services from reactive to proactive: instead of a resident chasing the city to find out what they're entitled to, the city works it out and offers them the best option. Helsinki has done exactly that with preschool places since 2021. There are no forms. The city simply texts parents an offer based on data it already holds. By drawing on AI, the city stops offering just "the nearest place" solution to one that is right for that family–proactive, personal, and earned from data the city already has.
Raimundo Rudolfo, Director of Innovation and Technology/Chief Innovation Officer, Coral Gables, Florida
AI has made a big impact as a highly disrupting force with tremendous capabilities, as well as risks. AI-powered, connected infrastructure and enterprise automation is providing great benefits in public safety, mobility and transportation, citizen services and user experience, among other areas.
Inga Rós Gunnarsdóttir, Chief Data Officer, City of Reykjavik, Iceland
Cities are reimagining municipal services through AI by moving from reactive, department-based service delivery towards more proactive, personalised and predictive services. AI can help residents navigate complex systems, understand what support they are entitled to, communicate with the city, and receive services that are better connected around their needs. AI can support employees by reducing administrative workload, summarising information, improving access to knowledge, and helping teams make better use of data in planning and service delivery.
The impact of AI on cities could be as profound as the rise of the automobile or the internet. AI has the potential to reshape the operating model of the city itself, how decisions are supported, how services are prioritised, how residents interact with government and how knowledge flows inside public organisations. That is why the real question is not whether AI will transform cities, but whether cities can ensure that this transformation strengthens public value, trust, fairness and democratic accountability.
Yi Wang, Head of Global Development Program, Anbound, China
The greatest impact on cities is how urban governance through AI is reconstructing the complex relationship between government, society, and the market. Algorithms can be used to allocate public data resources, potentially leading to "supra-governmental" governance.
Platform companies are gradually turning into intermediaries for public services, possibly replacing traditional hierarchical organizations where authority and responsibility are distributed in a top-down manner. Also, cross-border data flows will reshape the patterns of national sovereignty. Net-mobilization by social media could break through geographical boundaries and arouse spontaneous mass protests. When AI is closely integrated with people, capital, and political power, it could embed itself in the government systems, dominating social behavior and order change.
Michelle James, Vice President, Strategic Industry Program, CTIA
AI is fundamentally changing how cities think about municipal services by helping communities operate more intelligently across departments. AI allows communities to turn that information into actionable, predictive insights at scale. AI breaks down operational silos that, historically, were naturally formed by independent municipal departments. AI can unify data across transportation, utilities, and public safety operations to increase collaboration and enable faster decision-making, predictive maintenance, and more coordinated responses to community needs.
Compared with transformative technologies like the light bulb or the automobile or the internet, AI has similar potential to reshape how communities make decisions and deliver services, significantly impacting workforce behavior. By automating routine tasks, curating insights, and augmenting human expertise, AI allows municipal employees to spend less time on manual processes and more time solving complex problems, planning strategically, and improving quality of life for residents.
Sourced from https://thoughtlabgroup.com/what-does-a-people-first-ai-powered-city-look-like/?d-city-look-like%2F
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