“Smart” cities tend to be wealthy. Cities like Zurich, Canberra and Singapore are at the top IMD Smart Cities Index 2024which assesses the extent to which residents perceive that a city uses technology to improve their lives.
But AI could make it possible for less wealthy countries to afford the dream of having a smart, innovative, efficient and data-driven city, urban experts said Tuesday at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference.
AI “levels the playing field,” said Cha-Ly Koh, founder and CEO of Malaysian data analytics firm Urbanmetry.
Koh outlined the four processes needed to become a smart city: data collection, data analysis, decision-making, and action. “Today, data collection can be done at a much lower cost thanks to AI,” which lowers the barriers to entry for cities in less developed countries. Data analysis has also become more accessible.
AI could also make data collection less intrusive. Algorithms can mask faces, windows, addresses and other identifying data from drone video footage to meet privacy requirements. “ISO standards can be built right at the system level in terms of data encryption (and) sovereignty,” said Shaun Koo, CEO and co-founder of H3 Zoom.AI, which uses drones and AI to conduct building inspections.
Ultimately, governments, businesses and stakeholders “want insights,” he said. AI algorithms can integrate some of this unstructured data to provide “actionable results.”
Data and planning
Joe Xia, CEO of Jidu, a self-driving car company owned by Baidu and Geely, cited his previous experience as co-founder of Mobike, the Chinese bike-sharing service, as an example of how data can help with planning. Mobike used transportation data from buses, taxis and bicycles to determine the most efficient solutions for the “last mile” of public transportation. This in turn helped Chinese cities redesign their bus stops for better transit efficiency.
But not everything goes as planned.
Koh said she wanted to “curb the enthusiasm” around AI and smart cities, particularly around data-driven decision-making. “Can AI do everything in this part of the region? I think we’re still pretty far away from that,” she said, because “cities are fundamentally political.”
One political issue is labor, as workers fear being replaced by automated technologies. Taxi drivers in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where Baidu is testing a fleet of 500 Apollo robotaxis, are calling for their use to be limited. The Apollo cars are “stealing jobs from the grassroots,” one taxi company wrote in a letter in late June. would have been sent to the Wuhan government.
But Xia said it was still “a little early” to worry about large-scale job losses from robotaxis. He also suggested that new technologies could end up creating jobs in the long run: Automation will allow companies to expand production and services more efficiently, which in turn will lead to increased employment overall. (Jidu and Apollo focus on different products and markets, with the former focusing on assisted driving for individual consumers and the latter on fully automated robotaxis for institutional customers.)
Koh cautioned against viewing smart cities as something like SimCity, the famous series of urban management video games.
“Most of the time, people forget that people are protesting too,” she warns. “If we start monitoring everyone, we risk going too far.”
CEO Daily provides essential context for the information business leaders need to know. Every weekday morning, more than 125,000 readers trust CEO Daily for insights into leaders and their businesses. Subscribe now.
