As cities generate more data than ever, dashboards alone are no longer enough. This panel explores the shift from “smart” cities focused on monitoring and reporting to “cognitive” cities that use AI to predict outcomes, automate workflows, and support real-time decision-making. Panelists will discuss how municipalities can move from measuring performance to anticipating challenges, apply AI across operations, permitting, emergency response, transportation, and cybersecurity, and build the governance and public trust needed for responsible adoption. The conversation will also examine where cities may be overinvesting in technology visibility and underinvesting in intelligence, automation, and predictive capabilities.

How can cities move from reactive maintenance to proactive urban management? Most municipalities lack real-time visibility into their built environment, relying on expensive, infrequent manual or LiDAR surveys or ad-hoc 311 complaints to understand their city. Street-level city intelligence powered by AI offers a paradigm shift. By equipping a single vehicle with cameras, we can continuously capture street-level imagery. Using AI, the shared data stream automatically catalogs everything visible from the road, unlocking a proactive playbook across local government. It supplies prioritized repair lists for public works, flags early code violations to address issues before they become violations, tracks neighborhood revitalization and economic development impact metrics to present to city government, and empowers emergency management with wildfire and flood hazard detection and mitigation. In this panel, Placemetry’s founder and leadership from the City of Green Bay, WI, map out how to realistically implement these solutions. This panel offers a candid, forward-looking dialogue on how and why to implement these AI tools, including a discussion of city-side pain points, operational hurdles and vendor capabilities required to turn passive imagery into a cross-departmental innovation engine.

Local governments are rethinking how they deliver services, engage residents, and modernize operations in an increasingly digital world. This City Spotlight will showcase leaders who are driving digital transformation in their communities—making government more accessible, responsive, and efficient. From new platforms that simplify resident services to data strategies that improve decision-making, these cities are putting innovation into practice. Attendees will hear candid stories of what’s worked, what’s been challenging, and what’s next, leaving with ideas and inspiration to advance digital transformation in their own communities.

Connected infrastructure is reshaping how cities manage transportation, safety, and public services. This session will examine the role of smart lighting, intelligent traffic signals, and AI-driven technologies in creating safer streets, improving mobility, and delivering better outcomes for residents and city operators alike.

As cities become more connected, resilient, and data-driven, advanced communications networks are emerging as critical infrastructure. Join Ericsson and industry leaders for a discussion on how 5G, private wireless networks, edge computing, and intelligent connectivity are enabling the next generation of smart city services. From public safety and transportation to utilities, digital equity, and urban innovation, this panel will explore how cities can leverage secure, scalable connectivity to improve operations, accelerate innovation, and deliver better outcomes for residents.

As cities increasingly adopt artificial intelligence, how can they ensure technology enhances—not replaces—human-centered service delivery? This panel explores the City of Raleigh’s approach to leveraging AI through a resident-first lens, drawing on real-world technology pilots and customer experience research led by the Office of Innovation, Customer Experience program, and Department of Information Technology. Panelists will share how Raleigh uses a phased, human-centered design process to gather and incorporate resident feedback throughout the development and testing of new solutions. The discussion will highlight lessons learned, opportunities uncovered, and challenges encountered while working to make city services easier to navigate, improve issue resolution, reduce repeat interactions, and increase resident satisfaction. Attendees will gain practical insights into how municipalities can responsibly deploy AI to better inform, support, and serve their communities.

As cities invest in digital transformation, public safety must remain at the center of the smart city vision. This panel explores how innovative technologies, real-time data, and community partnerships can help create safer, more resilient communities for residents, workers, and visitors alike. Drawing on eBodyGuard’s mission to bridge the gap between personal safety and smart city innovation, the discussion will examine how emergency response tools, location intelligence, digital evidence management, and trusted data-sharing can enhance situational awareness and improve outcomes for both residents and first responders. Panelists will explore the role of technology in building safer public spaces, fostering community confidence, and ensuring that safety becomes a foundational pillar of every smart city strategy.

The City of Cambridge’s Consortium for Climate Solutions brought together public, academic, healthcare, and nonprofit partners to jointly procure more than 400MW of renewable energy through utility-scale virtual power purchase agreements (vPPAs). This session will explore how Cambridge used cross-sector collaboration to overcome procurement challenges, advance climate goals, and create scalable clean energy solutions. Panelists will discuss the partnership model, lessons learned, and how similar approaches can help cities and institutions drive future sustainability initiatives beyond energy.

AI is already inside your city. It is routing traffic, screening permit applications, allocating social services, and helping analysts interpret data across departments. Most residents do not know it exists. Many city officials are uncertain what it is doing — or, importantly, who is responsible when it goes wrong.This panel will not debate whether cities should use AI. They already are. The real question, and one that will define cities' relationships with their communities for the next decade, is: who is accountable for it, and how do we make that accountability visible and real? Drawing on frameworks from the U.S. and Europe, including AI transparency platforms, community oversight models, and emerging digital rights standards, the session takes a deliberately participatory approach.

Cities across the country are piloting new approaches to improve how people and goods move safely and efficiently. In this session, local leaders will share real-world examples of mobility initiatives underway in their communities—from public transit upgrades to emerging technology pilots. Join us to hear what’s working, the lessons learned, and the opportunities ahead in shaping more connected and accessible urban mobility.

Innovation happens on the ground, but economic growth depends on alignment across every level of government. This keynote brings together state economic development leaders and local innovation practitioners to explore how stronger collaboration can accelerate investment, workforce development, entrepreneurship, infrastructure modernization, and technology adoption. The discussion will examine how states and cities can move beyond siloed initiatives to build coordinated innovation ecosystems that attract talent, support emerging industries, and create lasting economic opportunity. Attendees will gain insights into successful partnership models, strategies for aligning priorities and resources, and the critical role local innovation teams play in advancing statewide economic competitiveness.

As demand for AI, cloud computing, and digital services accelerates, cities and states are facing difficult questions about the role of data centers in their communities. While these facilities can bring investment and support the digital economy, they also place significant demands on energy, water, land, and public infrastructure. This panel will explore how leaders can make informed decisions about data center development by weighing economic benefits against long-term community impacts. Topics will include grid capacity, energy affordability, sustainability, utility planning, local incentives, and strategies for ensuring residents and businesses continue to have reliable access to the resources they need. Panelists will discuss how communities can evaluate tradeoffs, establish responsible policies, and align data center growth with broader economic, environmental, and quality-of-life goals.

Most cities are still waiting for residents to report problems. Rancho Cordova decided to find them first.This panel shows how the City of Rancho Cordova partnered with City Detect to deploy AI-powered computer vision at operational scale, shifting from complaint-driven service delivery to proactive, data-informed city management. Using cameras mounted on existing city vehicles, the system identifies illegal dumping, graffiti, abandoned vehicles, debris, and property deterioration from the public right-of-way, without new infrastructure investment.Technology was only part of the story. Panelists will go deep on what made this work: governance frameworks that kept humans in the loop, privacy protections built into operations from day one, interdepartmental workflow alignment, and the change management required to move staff from skepticism to adoption. Attendees will hear measurable outcomes including faster issue identification, improved prioritization, and stronger voluntary compliance results. More importantly, they will leave with a practical roadmap covering the decisions to make, questions to ask vendors, and the internal alignment needed to move from pilot conversation to production deployment.This is not a conceptual session. It is a working playbook from a city that did it.

Technology is transforming every sector of the economy, but workforce development often struggles to keep pace. This panel will explore how cities, educational institutions, employers, and technology leaders can work together to prepare residents for the skills and jobs emerging from automation, AI, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, and digital transformation. Panelists will discuss innovative approaches to workforce training, talent retention, digital literacy, and creating pathways to opportunity that ensure economic growth benefits the entire community. As the pace of change accelerates, how can cities build a workforce that is adaptable, resilient, and ready for what comes next?

Cities today face no shortage of technology options—but identifying the right solutions, managing procurement requirements, and ensuring long-term value can be a challenge. This panel brings together government leaders and technology experts to discuss how municipalities can successfully navigate the rapidly evolving GovTech landscape. From cybersecurity and public safety to AI, digital services, and infrastructure modernization, panelists will share strategies for evaluating emerging technologies, accelerating procurement, reducing implementation risk, and building trusted partnerships. Attendees will gain practical insights into how cities can cut through the noise, make smarter technology investments, and deliver meaningful outcomes for residents.

Economic growth depends on more than incentives—it requires infrastructure that is ready for investment. As communities compete to attract new businesses, housing, manufacturing, and technology projects, the availability of power, broadband, transportation, water, and shovel-ready sites has become a key differentiator. This panel will explore how city, county, and regional leaders can identify infrastructure gaps, prioritize investments, and accelerate development readiness to meet future demand. Panelists will discuss the role of data-driven planning, public-private partnerships, and cross-sector collaboration in ensuring communities are prepared to support growth while maintaining quality of life, resilience, and long-term sustainability.

Digital twins are giving cities a new way to plan, test, and optimize transportation systems before making costly real-world changes. This panel explores how agencies are using virtual models of roads, intersections, transit networks, and traffic patterns to improve safety, reduce congestion, and make smarter mobility investments.

Cities are under pressure to innovate, but outdated procurement processes can slow progress. This panel explores how cooperative purchasing, strategic partnerships, and modern procurement approaches can help local governments access technology and infrastructure solutions more efficiently while maintaining transparency, compliance, and value for taxpayers. Panelists will share strategies for accelerating projects, reducing administrative burden, and turning procurement into a tool for innovation rather than a barrier to it.

Cities want to be smarter and healthier. The two problems that most directly shape whether they get there, congestion and transportation emissions, are usually studied with academic tools that never make it into an agency's actual workflow. A pilot runs, a paper publishes, and the MPO moves on. This panel is about a counter-example. Through a multi-year partnership with the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC), the Cornell team built two operational platforms that use the same agency data the MPO already produces. CMPO (Congestion Management Process Observatory) implements FHWA's Congestion Management Process as an automated, web-based workflow, turning travel demand outputs into federally recognized mobility, reliability, and equity metrics at corridor, county, and regional scales. TEAM-CITIES translates the same data into link-level, hour-by-hour transportation emissions with a parallelized cloud engine that makes street-level analysis affordable at a metropolitan scale. Both are in production with NYMTC and recently have been expanded across Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Chicago. The panel pairs the Cornell team that built the platforms with an NYMTC contractor who has worked inside the agency's adoption of them, so attendees hear both sides of the partnership.

Cities are finding creative new ways to strengthen trust and collaboration with their residents. From public safety partnerships to youth engagement and neighborhood-based initiatives, this session highlights how communities are co-creating solutions that reflect their shared values and aspirations. Join us to hear how local leaders are deepening civic connections and driving more inclusive engagement across their cities.

Cities are drowning in data but starving for decisions. Three Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellows, embedded in Trenton NJ, New Bedford MA, and Saint Paul, MN, spent two years inside city government redesigning the systems, workflows, and data infrastructure that determine whether residents get a home, a safe street, or a timely permit. Their work produced measurable results: a 78% reduction in open building permits, a 41% drop in low-acuity EMS calls through a chase vehicle pilot, a 40% decline in crime-related service calls in a targeted neighborhood, and more than 500 property applications processed through a redesigned resident-facing system. None of it required large technology budgets. All of it required rethinking how people, processes, and technology interact, in that order. This panel surfaces the practitioner's view: what it actually takes to move data from spreadsheets to decisions inside a resource-constrained city hall. Panelists will share how they navigated bureaucratic inertia, built cross-departmental coalitions, introduced AI tools to skeptical staff, and designed programs around resident experience rather than institutional convenience. The through-line is a framework any city can apply: start with people, fix the process, then only deploy the technology.

AI is rapidly evolving from a tool that provides insights to one that can help execute tasks and automate workflows. This panel will examine how emerging AI agents and intelligent automation are reshaping government operations, enabling staff to focus on higher-value work while improving service delivery. Panelists will discuss opportunities, risks, governance considerations, and what city leaders should be doing today to prepare for the next generation of AI-powered government.

As cities face rising temperatures and increasing climate challenges, traditional government approaches are often not enough to deliver large-scale change. This session explores a new model of collaboration, bringing together a Houston City Council Member and place management leaders from Houston to examine how elected officials and implementation-focused organizations can work together to create cooler, more resilient public spaces. The discussion will explore how cities can overcome political and funding barriers, align community priorities with citywide goals, and build shared roadmaps for climate-responsive infrastructure, including shade, lighting, and pedestrian improvements.

What does it mean to be a "smart city" in 2026? The answer has evolved beyond technology alone. Today's smartest communities are leveraging AI, data, resilient infrastructure, and innovative partnerships to improve quality of life, strengthen public trust, and deliver better outcomes for residents. This annual opening keynote will explore the trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the future of cities—from AI adoption and cybersecurity to mobility, climate resilience, and funding priorities. Attendees will gain a forward-looking perspective on where local innovation stands today and what will define the next generation of smart communities.The session will also feature a special announcement from TechConnect, setting the stage for an exciting year ahead and reinforcing Smart Cities Connect as the premier gathering for municipal innovation.

The conference may be ending, but the work is just beginning. This dynamic closing keynote brings together municipal leaders to reflect on the ideas, innovations, and partnerships shaping the future of cities. Through candid conversations about breakthrough initiatives, lessons learned, and what's next, along with live audience polling and interactive Q&A, attendees will identify the biggest opportunities and challenges ahead. The session will leave participants inspired, connected, and ready to turn the conversations from Smart Cities Connect into action in their own communities.

City leaders share how they are modernizing core operations and infrastructure to improve efficiency, resilience, and service delivery. Panelists will highlight efforts in areas such as emergency management, cybersecurity, and asset management, showcasing strategies that strengthen reliability and sustainability across urban systems.

For over 50 years, the St. Louis Collector of Revenue’s Office utilized a mainframe-based earnings tax system processing approximately 1 million transactions and collecting over $320 million in revenue annually. The system was essential to operations but unable to expand digital services or meet customer expectations. Recognizing that future innovation required a stronger foundation, the Collector’s IT team developed Janus, a modern tax administration platform, to replace the legacy system while preserving taxpayer data and supporting future integrations and digital services. The project migrated accounts and millions of records from a 1970s-era mainframe into a scalable platform built for continuous improvement. One of the first initiatives was a partnership with PayIt to transform the taxpayer experience. Together, they developed a secure API integration giving taxpayers real-time access to account information, outstanding balances, delinquent periods, and payments, replacing a limited process with a user-friendly digital experience. This session explores the journey from legacy mainframe to a modern, API-enabled platform, highlighting a public-private partnership to deliver real-world results. Speakers will share lessons learned from data migration, system modernization, integration design, and deployment, and how Janus and PayIt are transforming the taxpayer experience and laying the foundation for future innovation.

Cities are under pressure to accelerate housing, economic development, infrastructure, resilience, and downtown revitalization—but implementation often slows because critical information is scattered across zoning codes, GIS data, plans, public documents, and departmental silos.This session explores how cities can leverage AI, GIS, document intelligence, and digital twin-style workflows to transform existing information into actionable, parcel-level decision support. From identifying opportunities for housing and redevelopment to understanding zoning, infrastructure, and policy constraints, the discussion will focus on practical ways cities can make faster, more informed decisions. Led from the perspective of a mayor driving local economic development, this conversation will explore how technology can reduce friction in planning while keeping transparency, public trust, human oversight, and local decision-making at the center.

Cities are investing in public safety technology, but many struggle to move beyond disconnected systems and pilot programs. This panel explores how the City of Miami built a real-time public safety ecosystem by integrating intelligence platforms, analytics, drones, cameras, gunshot detection, records management, and field operations into a unified framework. Leaders from law enforcement, municipal technology, private industry, and academia will discuss the realities of implementation—from breaking down data silos and integrating systems to addressing governance, privacy, and organizational trust. Panelists will share how real-time intelligence has improved situational awareness, accelerated decision-making, optimized resource deployment, and delivered measurable results, including reductions in violent crime, shootings, vehicle thefts, and property crime. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for turning technology investments into safer, smarter, and more resilient communities.