By Alice Chambers |
Cities across the globe are embracing technologies such as AI, digital twins and machine learning to improve liveability, streamline development and accelerate progress toward sustainability goals. Speakers at Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) 2025 shared insights into how governments and urban planners are harnessing data-driven tools – many powered by Microsoft and its partners – to create smarter, more resilient cities.
Bader Mohammed Altamimi, vice president of planning for Riyadh Infrastructure Projects Center, outlined how Saudi Arabia is using digital platforms and AI to coordinate infrastructure development as part of its vision for Riyadh to become one of the world’s top 10 capital cities (by increasing economy, beauty, quality of life and population). Rapid urbanisation brings inevitable challenges, from traffic disruption to public dissatisfaction. To address this, Altamimi explained how the country has implemented an integrated infrastructure plan that enables developers to share their project timelines for the next three years.
“We can’t stop development, but we can make it smarter,” said Altamimi. “Our system uses AI to analyse information to prevent overlapping projects, reduce disruption for residents and maintain efficient place management.”
Next, Doug Priest, public transportation and urban infrastructure lead for worldwide government at Microsoft, explored how cities can become frontier through enriching government employee experiences, reinventing citizen engagement, reshaping government processes and bending the curve on innovation.
AI-powered tools like Microsoft Copilot can simplify government processes. Cities such as Burlington in Ontario, Canada, are embedding Copilot agents into chat-based systems to automate tasks and cut bureaucracy.
“You don’t need a deep technical background to build an agent,” said Priest. “By using Microsoft’s agent framework, cities can create automated workflows across departments.”
The City of Burlington has already reduced the building permit approval process from 15 weeks to five to seven weeks, a 30 per cent improvement in permit turnaround time.
Read more: Building the cities of the future in the Autumn 2025 issue of Technology Record
For Ursula Eicker, research chair at Next Generation Cities Institute, digital transformation is also critical to achieving climate neutrality. She emphasised that while urban data provides valuable insights, cities need predictive modelling to achieve net-zero targets. In Montreal, the Government of Canada is using digital twins to simulate retrofits and mobility patterns, helping planners identify optimal areas for greening initiatives such as planting 500,000 trees.
“Data alone won’t tell you how to reach zero emissions for every building,” she said. “We need models that deliver tailored retrofit strategies for each one.”
Other speakers highlighted how generative AI and vision-language models (VLMs) are advancing smart city operations.
Max Huang, project director of government business for Dahua Technology, described how large language models can enhance city management through real-time video analytics, from detecting abnormal behaviour and predicting vehicle theft to identifying traffic accidents and public safety risks. “AI is improving accuracy and helping governments understand what’s really happening on the ground,” he said.
In the City of Espoo, Finland, Valia Wistuba, development manager, shared how AI is improving inclusion and education in one of Europe’s most multilingual cities, where a quarter of inhabitants speak a language other than Finnish. Espoo has developed an AI-supported self-assessment tool for language proficiency, cutting test times from four hours in a classroom to just 30 minutes online. The initiative forms part of the city’s broader AI journey, which promotes piloting, experimentation and cultural exchange.
Finally, Charbel Aoun, smart city and spaces director for EMEA at NVIDIA, discussed the untapped potential of data generated by city surveillance networks. “Every city has thousands of cameras where data is being deleted but that data holds knowledge and possibilities for development,” he said.
By integrating real-time video data into digital twins and using VLMs – “the same principle as ChatGPT, but with video” – cities can move toward what he described as an ‘AI factory’ model, where AI becomes a strategic infrastructure for innovation. “Factories of the past made physical products,” he said. “Now, we can build products of intelligence.”