150 PUBLIC SECTOR Turning data action into AI is emerging as a catalyst for change, helping cities turn fragmented data into actionable intelligence, rethink operations and make faster, more informed decisions. Rebecca Gibson speaks with Microsoft’s Doug Priest to find out more 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.
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