151 FEATURE Photo: iStock/carlofranco “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 decisionmaking 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.” 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 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
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