Wayne Arvidson, global CTO of verticals, computer vision and AI at Dell Technologies, and Charbel Aoun, smart cities and spaces director EMEA at NVIDIA, discuss how AI can be used in cities to improve personal experiences for residents and staff alike, and explain the cascading benefits of adopting the technology early.
Operational efficiency, resource efficiency, cost-effectiveness – these are all critical elements of improving a city’s bottom line. They’re also an essential part of providing personal experiences and services in cities that are positive, reliable, and sustainable.
When we talk about personal experiences in cities, we’re referring to the experiences of three main groups: inhabitants (comprising citizens, residents, and tourists), employees, and vendors. We’ll come to talk about the citizen experience at length, so let’s dwell on those latter groups first.
For employees, it’s about their work environment and the tools they have to serve the public effectively. AI and other technologies can streamline their tasks, reduce administrative burdens, and help them provide better service, ultimately enhancing job satisfaction and efficiency.
For vendors, it involves their experience in doing business with the city. This covers everything from the onboarding process, obtaining necessary permits and regulatory compliance, to participating in the bidding process and getting paid. A streamlined and transparent process makes it easier for vendors to engage with the city and provide their services efficiently.
The improved experience for these groups then feeds into creating better experiences and services for a city’s inhabitants, all seeking smooth interactions with city services and to efficiently have their needs met. This includes obtaining permits, reporting issues, providing visitor information, or simply navigating city facilities like parks and parking spaces, where a smooth, responsive, and user-friendly experience is key.
How AI brings these experiences together
The use of AI in cities sees the impact of the technology filter down from working with third parties in the first instance, to making city workforces more effective and efficient, to creating personalised experiences for residents.
From the perspective of enhancing the experiences for all city inhabitants, the primary focus is on enhancing interactions with city infrastructure and services. The key is to make these interactions more efficient and provide a higher level of service for everyone. For example, when someone needs to utilise city facilities, such as parking, AI can significantly improve their experience by optimising availability and ease of access.
When we strip this back a level, and see the overlapping benefits for city employees and inhabitants, we begin to see a force multiplier applied to AI adoption. A practical example is when someone needs to obtain a permit – let’s say they want to install a pool. Currently, this process often involves contacting multiple departments – zoning, building permits, and environmental regulations.
This opens up the possibility that each department potentially provides different answers – and if you speak to a different person even in the same team, you might get a different response. AI can simplify this by consolidating all necessary information into a single interaction. An individual could engage with an AI tool, explain their project, and receive a customised form that automatically integrates all required steps and approvals across various departments. This reduces the need for multiple phone calls and ensures consistent information and faster processing times, which results in a better experience for the user and frees up city staff for higher-value tasks.
AI can also help generate work orders and ensure they are processed in a timely manner. This is crucial because in many departments, work orders are still manually noted and can easily be delayed. AI can create and track these orders digitally, placing residents appropriately in the queue based on when they contacted the city. This system ensures that follow-up is not necessary as the AI manages and updates the status of requests efficiently.
An additional advantage is AI’s ability to communicate with residents in their native languages. In diverse cities, this ensures that all residents, visitors, and tourists receive clear and consistent information, regardless of their language. This multilingual support enhances inclusivity and ensures that non-native speakers and international visitors can interact with city services just as effectively as native speakers. This capability is particularly beneficial for temporary inhabitants such as tourists, who may require assistance navigating unfamiliar urban environments.
Treating AI as foundational technology
City operations teams have many data sources, including sensors that are digitising the environment extensively, constantly providing input and feedback. The key challenge for cities is transforming this vast data into actionable insights. Innovations like generative AI and large vision language models (VLM) for video and data analysis enable users to speak directly to AI agent helpers in natural language. And since cities are physical spaces, digital twins for simulating physical AI applications can be critical for testing and refining new services. Underlying this are natural language processing-powered AI agents and chatbots that are breaking new ground by giving everyone direct access to the technology.
As such, AI is also an enabler for several other advanced technologies that can significantly enhance personal experiences in cities – such as digital twins. Digital twins allow cities to create virtual replicas of physical assets, infrastructure, and even entire urban environments. This can greatly improve experiences from a computing perspective, enabling more efficient management and planning.
Giving city managers rich insights relies heavily on the powerful perception capabilities of generative AI-powered computer vision models and VLMs. These technologies enable the development of completely new AI agents and helpers that can monitor and address scenarios – including visual pollution, such as graffiti and litter – that are important to cities, and identify broken infrastructure.
By automating these processes with AI agents, cities can deploy many more capabilities and engage with them in natural language, resulting in cleaner and more pleasant environments that directly benefit all who experience them.
Response time and quality of solutions are crucial for the satisfaction of all city inhabitants. AI helps streamline processes, ensuring quicker response times and higher-quality resolutions. Residents, visitors, and tourists alike can see efficiency in the use of tax dollars, thanks to AI, and gain an overall more positive experience. When processes are streamlined, cities can allocate more resources to the maintenance of other important areas, like parks, facilities, and other venues, not only improving current infrastructure but also enhancing quality of life for everyone.
Achieving true personalisation of service and experience
There are several factors driving the shift to more personalised public services, one of which is the increased accessibility of sophisticated AI tools for cities. In the past, cities had two main options: they could either purchase standardised AI applications, which offered limited and pre-defined outcomes, or they could invest heavily in a team of data scientists and extensive resources to develop customised solutions tailored to their specific needs – which is almost inconceivably time-consuming and expensive for the majority of cities.
However, the landscape is changing thanks to platforms like those offered by Dell and NVIDIA. These platforms provide validated solutions with low-code or no-code building blocks, making it easier for city IT departments to implement advanced technologies such as large language models, natural language processing, GIS integration, and digital twins. These tools enable the delivery of personalised services to enhance user experience, safety, operational efficiency, and sustainability. The ability to create customised outcomes is now realistic for more cities than ever before.
The power and sophistication of these technologies continue to grow as more data is collected from interactions with the public. This data feeds into the AI models, making them increasingly sophisticated and capable of providing higher levels of customisation.
We’re witnessing an extraordinary period of technological evolution. It’s impossible to predict the future with certainty, but the rapid pace of technological advancement and its adoption curve are evident. The real question is how we transition these tools into practical, human-centred services.
The power of multimodal AI, which integrates speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and data centralisation, is transforming cities. Cities can now tap into databases, understand individual profiles, and deliver bespoke services via text, voice, and video.
This isn’t just a vision of the future – it’s a reality that’s starting to take shape today.
For more information, visit www.dell.com/computervision
Register your interest for an AI Accelerator Workshop: bit.ly/DELLworkshop
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Wayne Arvidson
Quelle/Source: Smart Cities World, 07.08.2024
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