Cities worldwide are reaching the limits of first-generation “smart city” programs. While many have digitized services and deployed sensors, most still operate through fragmented systems, siloed data, and reactive decision-making. As urban complexity accelerates, driven by population growth, climate stress, fiscal pressure, and rising citizen expectations. These limitations increasingly constrain performance, resilience, and equity. The AI-First City report argues that incremental technology upgrades are no longer sufficient. What cities now need is a fundamental redesign of how they sense conditions, make decisions, and coordinate action across the urban system.
The report introduces the AI-First City model, which positions AI not as a standalone tool but as the core operating engine of the city. It outlines a unified approach built around three reinforcing capabilities: Sense, creating a real-time, integrated view of urban conditions through a digital nervous system; Analyze, transforming multimodal data into predictive intelligence and foresight across domains; and Orchestrate, enabling coordinated, and increasingly agentic, urban operations with human oversight. Applied across infrastructure, economic development, human and social services, and government operations, this model allows cities to shift from reactive service delivery to proactive, adaptive, and performance-driven management. Case examples from cities such as Seoul, Singapore, Barcelona, and Shanghai illustrate how this approach can materially improve mobility, safety, resilience, service quality, and fiscal outcomes.
Crucially, the report emphasizes that technology alone does not deliver transformation. AI-first cities succeed by strengthening five enabling foundations: clear governance and institutional alignment, coherent policy and Responsible AI frameworks, robust data governance and interoperability, AI-ready talent and organizational capabilities, and strong partnerships with industry and local innovation ecosystems. Together, these elements allow cities to move beyond isolated pilots toward safe, scalable, whole-of-city AI adoption. The report concludes that cities that act now by aligning institutions, capabilities, and operating models around AI can unlock a new era of urban performance and livability, while those that delay risk falling behind in the next phase of global urban leadership.