- Dubai, New York City, Washington, DC, and Amsterdam Follow London in Overall Rankings
- Residents in Cities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East Are Among the World’s Most Active and Enthusiastic Users of GenAI
- Five Domains of Intelligent City Performance Each Led by Different Cities, Highlighting Multiple Pathways to Success
- Cities Can Start Improving Resident Outcomes with Intelligent AI-Enabled Services Even Before Ramping Up World-Class Infrastructure and Funding
BOSTON—London, Dubai, New York City, Washington, DC, and Amsterdam top the rankings of the world’s most intelligent cities according to new research from Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Yet even these pioneering cities excel in different areas and none of them leads across every domain, underscoring that no city has mastered every relevant dimension. Intelligent city leadership is defined by different combinations of strengths rather than a single model. Further, even leading intelligent cities have room to grow in maturity across specific dimensions, as residents’ expectations increase with fast-evolving technology, including AI.
The report, BCG’s Intelligent Cities Index 2026: How AI Shapes Urban Living, is the firm’s inaugural assessment of how 61 of the world’s biggest cities across 39 countries use technology to serve their residents and businesses. The Index evaluates cities across five domains of intelligent city maturity: outcomes, strategy, adoption, ways of working, and enablers. A city’s overall maturity level reflects its combined maturity across domains: leading, accelerating, emerging, or developing.
The report also finds that cities do not need to begin with, or focus solely on world-class infrastructure or deep funding ecosystems to improve resident outcomes. Expanding intelligent AI-enabled city services can strengthen quality of life and overall intelligent city maturity regardless of a city’s starting point, demonstrating that multiple pathways exist to becoming a smarter city, aligned with each city’s current maturity across domains.
The Virtuous Circle of AI Value
The report uncovers a clear alignment between how frequently residents use GenAI tools and how positively they view AI’s future impact. Residents who use AI most often are also the most optimistic about the technology’s potential to improve opportunity, productivity, and quality of life.
This creates a virtuous circle. Positive experiences with AI increase resident confidence, giving city leaders a further opening to enable AI more fully and provide more value to beneficiaries through new and improved intelligent city services. This value feeds yet more optimism, which drives more engagement, innovation, and scaling as the cycle repeats.
Cities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are particularly prominent in this pattern, showing the strongest GenAI momentum, pairing high usage with high optimism about its future impact.
Younger, fast-growing urban populations also show especially high enthusiasm, leading disproportionately in usage and satisfaction, indicating that demographics are an important factor in helping to shape the next phase of adoption, as cities cater to current and future generations.
“AI is a key foundation of the intelligent city, and AI adoption and optimism are not confined to the ‘usual suspects’ technology hubs,” said Akram Awad, managing director and partner at BCG and coauthor of the report. “Cities around the world are creating value for residents in different ways and from different starting points. We built the Intelligent Cities Index to provide an objective, holistic view of how cities shape and enable their AI ambitions and how effectively those ambitions translate into meaningful improvements in people’s lives.”
Different Leaders and Different Pathways to Success
While London tops the overall rankings, the five domains are topped as follows:
- London leads in resident outcomes
- Madrid leads in intelligent city strategy
- Dubai leads in adoption
- New York City leads in ways of working
- Amsterdam leads in enablers
Every city in the Index has a different starting point. Several pathways forward are available, with strong outcomes and maturity stemming from either “balanced builders” diversifying strengths across domains or “focused specialists” targeting excellence in specific areas.
The report identifies several characteristics associated with stronger performance:
- AI deployment leads to better resident outcomes. Cities that are embedding AI into core intelligent services are delivering faster, stronger results.
- Smart city app use and satisfaction rise together. This creates another virtuous cycle, with younger cities leading disproportionately in both usage and satisfaction.
- Technology alone is insufficient. The most mature cities in the Index combine both hard enablers such as data, tech, and infrastructure with soft enablers like talent and funding.
- Smart city funding and startup ecosystems drive economic activity. Focus is needed on entrepreneurship and innovation to ultimately fulfill resident expectations.
The authors conclude by detailing a roadmap that lays out the important steps toward stronger outcomes, no matter if a city is leading or lower in maturity. These include establishing clear long-term strategic priorities, strengthening governance and public-private partnerships, scaling proven AI-enabled services, and investing in data and technology platforms, infrastructure, talent, and innovation ecosystems needed to sustain intelligent city progress and transformation.
“Given today’s rapid pace of change and evolving resident expectations, building a city’s intelligent foundation, paired with focused improvement across enablers requires urgency. But city leaders and business partners don’t need to try to do everything all at once,” said Rami Mourtada, a partner and director at BCG and coauthor of the report. “It’s a longer-term horizon and there is no single pathway forward. Intelligent city momentum comes from making intentional, and sometimes incremental, choices now and building for a smarter tomorrow with a clear, comprehensive roadmap.”
Media Contact:
Eric Gregoire
gregoire.eric@bcg.com
