AI to Accelerate Race to Build Smarter Cities

Building so-called Smarter Cities has long been touted as a major goal for municipalities around the globe. But building systems capable of responding to events in real time is a major challenge for any government operating on a limited IT budget. The hope is that processes will become integrated enough to create a massive pool of data that will then be employed to drive any number of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The problem is that while city governments typically have access to massive amounts of data, most of it resides in isolated systems run by departments that are often at odds with one another. In fact, Daniel Newman, principal analyst with Futurum, says smart cities are mostly a figment of vendor marketing imagination. "The trouble with smart cities is they don't exist yet," says Newman.