The concept of a smart city has been around for a long time, but many cities end up providing only isolated services, such as bike-sharing schemes or smart bins. In reality, a truly smart city involves much more. It requires a well-designed IT infrastructure capable of managing a range of functions—from traffic management and water services to administrative tasks. For a city to be genuinely smart, its infrastructure must be built to deliver these services effectively and leverage AI to enhance collaboration among various departments within the city government.

Achieving this vision is not always straightforward. It necessitates careful consideration of residents' actual needs and the technology required to fulfill those needs. A successful smart city relies on having a clear, forward-thinking plan and establishing the appropriate technological infrastructure from the outset.

A unified strategy
What is stopping cities adopting ‘smart’ technology? Funding and co-operation are often an all-too-familiar problem. It takes many different departments working together, sometimes in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. For example, if local governments want to improve its transport network, it might also need to look at power and internet connections to handle the new city infrastructure. These all typically fall into different domains. However, if cities adopt the right infrastructure, AI has the potential to integrate information from siloed departments and foster cooperation, empowering cities with the technological coherence needed to drive innovation.

Dubai’s smart city project is using AI to break down the barriers between departments, and between citizens and government services. The team is taking the right approach when it comes to urban development, with more than 130 smart projects and 1,000 smart services, including eliminating paper from Government altogether, and aiming to build ‘the happiest city on Earth.’ Dubai’s authorities have implemented AI effectively to allow these departments to integrate and restructure, and cleverly deploy applications to remove paper forms and long-winded manual processes.

In this example of Dubai, it isn’t about the city being smart, it’s about making the processes smart. Taking this approach delivers efficiency whether you are using the functions of the city as a tourist or a resident. If you’re processing your visa, paying your water bill or moving your phone contract, it’s all much easier than before. Dubai is now looking for a generative AI assistant to help people find the government services they need in real-time, delivering a personalized touch for citizens.

Contrary to the AI scaremongering, breaking down these barriers doesn’t take away people’s jobs, rather it allows their time to be used more efficiently. In Abu Dhabi, sensors are used to monitor the level of water stored in tanks around the city. This IoT implementation already replaces a previously manual process where inspectors were sent to make a visual assessment. Utilizing the data collected from tanks city-wide, AI algorithms can automatically trigger a service team to be on site to refill it via real-time readings, as well as suggesting when maintenance of the tanks may be necessary. This has meant that inspectors who previously had to spend time checking tanks can focus on affecting change and working on other important jobs, such as assessing water quality or enacting regulations.

Nurturing trust in AI innovation
AI can deliver public safety, but it is key to build trust around this technology, highlight important benefits and ensure residents and visitors don’t feel like they are being ‘watched’. With traditional surveillance cameras, there’s a huge amount of data that remains unused and is never analyzed. Applying AI to this mass of data, in a privacy-minded way, has helped cities make people safer and even saves lives. In fact, half of government officials say that public safety is the main reason for the adoption of smart city technology, according to 451 Research.

Denmark’s railway authorities have carried out research using AI and machine learning to watch station platforms and alert station staff if someone is about to get onto the train tracks. For example, people who have dropped their phones on the line are often so fixed on getting it back that they forget the risks involved and put themselves in grave danger. The AI ‘learns’ the patterns that show when someone might be about to put themselves at risk, and would trigger an alert. With such technology, people need to be assured that their privacy rights are being respected, and when it’s demonstrated that AI can boost safety, without being intrusive, people are happier with the idea. Smart cities can find a balance of delivering services without feeling like ‘Big Brother’, communicating that when using computer vision systems, privacy is always respected, and people’s safety is paramount.

Data in the streets
In a smart city, street cabinets and street lights become edge data centers that process everything from whether a parking space is empty to when there are dangerous levels of pollutants in the air. But the secret sauce is the overall design and deploying computer to where the data is generated. Cities can then capture data at street level, whether it’s a car moving from a space to a traffic jam forming.

Using AI and machine learning, they can filter what is relevant and what is not at that street level, discarding irrelevant information and creating very strong and clean data pipes.

The key is orchestration. With traditional compute, where one application is on a single node, a ‘smart parking’ system would require many, many nodes, making it inefficient and expensive. But if you use more modern techniques for containerization, you can deploy multiple applications to each compute node, by virtualising them. Where orchestration comes in is how to enable that to scale so you can push applications across the city, manage, monitor and secure them. Once those components are properly planned, you’re able to put applications on top and put them into those cabinets on the street. This infrastructure, this technological coherence, is fundamental to building an effective smart city.

Cities of the future
Success in any smart city depends on several key factors. First and foremost, it requires a clear vision and a commitment to providing services that genuinely enhance residents' quality of life—whether through streamlining government operations, improving safety, or maintaining a strong emphasis on privacy. Departments must collaborate effectively to serve citizens, a task where AI can play a crucial role by breaking down barriers and facilitating data sharing across various departments. Most importantly, a smart city needs a robust and cohesive technological infrastructure that allows city leaders to deliver and continually refine services for their residents. This demands careful planning and consideration from the very start.