The City of Raleigh in North Carolina is one of the USA’s fastest growing cities. Over the past three decades, its population has doubled to more than half a million residents, and it welcomes 19 million visitors annually. When manual processes made it too difficult to manage increased traffic, the city turned to AI. It now uses an interactive digital twin built on Microsoft Azure, combining geospatial software from Esri and video analytics from Nvidia to analyse traffic patterns and deliver real time insights.
Today, Raleigh’s two transportation engineers have 24/7 visibility into 12 busy intersections and receive analytics four times faster, enabling them to deliver output comparable to 10–20 employees. The twin delivers 95 per cent vehicle detection and trajectory accuracy, and is already helping to improve intersection flow and resource deployment. The city expects to save commuters $9.7 million in fuel and travel costs by optimising signal patterns along one of its busiest corridors.
Raleigh is one of many cities exploring how AI could help them proactively manage systems and services across the urban environment, transforming the way they operate and deliver services.
“In the past decade, cities have become much better at collecting information from various sources to measure everything from traffic flow to air quality and public infrastructure health,” says Doug Priest, public transportation and urban infrastructure lead for worldwide government at Microsoft. “Now, they’re drowning in data and need an effective way to make sense of it, so they can respond to what’s happening across the city in real time.
“AI can ingest and analyse large volumes of data signals, helping identify patterns, anomalies and actionable insights at a speed and scale that would previously have been difficult to achieve. City leaders can gain the insights they need to strengthen situational awareness, coordinate decision-making and optimise resources across their departments, which will increase operational resilience in the long term.”
However, to build genuine resilience, city leaders must do more than simply add AI to existing processes.
“The most successful cities view AI as a tool for rethinking their entire operational model,” says Priest. “They start by outlining their main mission – this could be improving citizen safety or emergency response – and work backwards to determine how AI tools can help them reach that goal.”
The City of Raleigh in North Carolina now uses digital twins powered by technology from Microsoft, Esri and Nvidia to manage traffic flow in real time (Image: iStock/carlofranco)
Using AI to expedite data analysis creates an opportunity for city leaders to automate basic, repetitive processes and free up workers to focus on higher-value tasks aligned with their subject matter expertise. “Public sector employees are experts in their field, so we want them focused on using this knowledge to help cities achieve their main mission, not performing basic tasks like cleaning data.”
For this operational transformation to work, however, city leaders must consider governance, security, compliance and workforce skills from the outset.
“These elements have to be built in at the beginning,” says Priest. “Security, compliance and governance aren’t an additional burden, but rather a foundational layer. Cities can move faster when appropriate security, governance and compliance controls are embedded into their technology and operating processes from the outset. These controls can help teams apply organisational policies, manage risk and support regulatory compliance, while preserving appropriate human oversight.”
Building these foundations also enables cities to easily move to a ‘system of systems’ approach.
“City leaders don’t have to rip and replace existing applications or consolidate everything into a single platform to achieve this kind of unified operational picture,” says Priest. “Advances in cloud computing and AI are making it easier to connect and analyse data across all these systems at a speed that supports real-time decision-making.”
To connect disparate systems, city leaders need to understand who owns each dataset, who can access them and how frequently they are updated. It’s also crucial for different departments to be able to interpret information consistently. “It’s challenging if planning, transport and emergency services have different identifiers or definitions for the same assets, for example,” says Priest. “However, when that shared understanding is in place, agencies can easily act on unified intelligence in real time.”
During a flood, for instance, transport, planning and emergency services can share live data to predict the impact of road closures on public transport, traffic flow and emergency access, helping teams optimise resource allocation.
“The goal is to create a direct path from information to action, so the right person can apply data insights at the right moment to achieve the best outcome,” says Priest. “Different employees will need different levels of detail depending on their role, so the information must be presented in whatever format is most useful to them.”
As cities begin connecting these systems and reshaping how they operate, many find they need additional expertise to accelerate the transformation.
“The type of transformation cities want to achieve involves much more than just implementing an AI solution; it requires a holistic, cross agency approach,” says Priest. “Every city has different priorities, existing technology estates and established relationships with suppliers. Some may need specialist applications, while others want support integrating multiple data sources or developing bespoke solutions.”
Microsoft and its extensive ecosystem of partners are playing a crucial role, bringing specialist capabilities in areas such as analytics, integration and systems implementation.
“We have long-term partners like Esri and Nvidia offering foundational solutions that are already widely used by cities, as well as partners taking an AI-native approach to add new capabilities on top of existing systems,” says Priest. “We also have integration partners – including global firms like Accenture, EY and KPMG and smaller regional specialists – who help governments assemble these components, connect data sources and build solutions tailored to local needs. Microsoft works across all three layers and we’re collaborating more closely with our customers than ever.”
To drive lasting transformation, city leaders must also set a clear vision for how AI will enhance operations and equip employees with the skills, confidence and support to use them in their daily work.
“Public sector organisations have a responsibility to manage change carefully, but that should not prevent them from exploring new ways to improve services,” says Priest. “It makes a real difference when senior leaders establish a clear vision, create appropriate guardrails and give employees the confidence to experiment responsibly with new tools.”
The most successful cities, says Priest, also create centres of excellence to help drive broader adoption. “They assign ‘power users’ who test applications for the new technologies, show how they can benefit employees and answer questions from colleagues,” he says. “This cross pollination of ideas is a key differentiator between agencies that successfully roll out AI at scale and those who make limited progress.”
Embedding AI into existing workflows is equally important to driving adoption. “If employees have to move between multiple applications or manually copy and paste information, they’re less likely to use AI tools,” says Priest. “Integrating AI directly into the flow of work ensures it becomes a natural part of daily operations rather than an added burden.”
If cities get the basics right, they will lay the groundwork for an even bigger shift in how they use AI in the years ahead.
“AI has advanced considerably in the past 18-24 months,” says Priest. “The major shift is that we’re now using AI to do far more than just answer questions or find information quickly. We’re seeing the convergence of specialised AI agents actively helping people to coordinate work, complete tasks and make data-driven decisions in real time. The number of potential AI applications will keep growing as the technology continues to evolve and improve.”
For Priest, perhaps the most significant impact of AI will be the speed at which cities can respond to the evolving needs of communities.
“AI allows us to build, deploy and get feedback on technology investments faster than ever before,” he says. “Over time, this will enable cities to become more agile and responsive, allowing them to continually adapt services and make real incremental improvements towards their desired outcomes. That’s tremendously exciting.”
The focus, however, should remain firmly on these outcomes rather than AI itself. “Ultimately, the success of AI projects won’t be measured by how many agents were deployed or how many employees used them, but by whether it helped public sector organisations to achieve their goals,” says Priest. “By keeping their desired goals as their ‘north star’, organisations will be able to identify where technology can make the greatest difference, build better solutions and drive real change.”
Coretek shares how it is using Microsoft AI and cloud technologies to help public sector organisations make faster, data-driven decisions and build resilience
Enabling intelligence-driven operations
“Coretek helps public sector organisations break down data silos and modernise legacy environments by leveraging Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Fabric, AI Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot to create connected, intelligence-driven operating models. Through our AI Envisioning and AI Frontier Factory methodologies, we help agencies integrate critical systems, unify data sources and establish secure platforms that provide real-time visibility across operations. By combining cloud modernisation, data platform transformation and AI-powered analytics, organisations can accelerate decision-making, improve service delivery and respond more effectively to changing demands. The result is a more resilient public sector enterprise where leaders have access to trusted, actionable insights and employees can focus on delivering better outcomes for the communities they serve.”
Brian Barnes
Chief Technology Officer, Coretek
Read more like this, including news, interviews, case studies and insight from industry experts, in the Autumn 2026 issue of Technology Record. To get content like this on a regular basis, subscribe to the print edition or free digital edition of the quarterly Technology Record magazine.