How cities are scaling AI into operations 22 May 2026 by Jonathan Andrews We spoke to three members of the City Innovation Network—Boston in North America and Prague and Sunderland in Europe—about how they are deploying AI to implement city-wide impact The deployment of artificial intelligence is forcing a fundamental rethink of how public services are designed, delivered and improved, particularly as pressure grows to demonstrate tangible outcomes rather than isolated innovation. Across Europe and North America, local governments have spent several years testing AI through pilots, ranging from chatbots and optimisation tools to predictive analytics and automation. While such projects have demonstrated value in controlled environments, most cities are a long way from bringing AI into day-to-day operations. The opportunity to implement data-driven decision-making, optimised workflows and outcomes at scale is yet to be realised. Silicon Highway, an AI delivery partner working with cities to take projects from proof of concept to full deployment, says that just 7 percent of pilots reach enterprise scale, with many failing to move beyond early validation stages. That gap is not driven by a lack of technical capability, but by the difficulty of embedding those capabilities into the operational and organisational structures that define how cities function. “Cities often stall at the point where insight needs to become action,” says Nadeem Ullah, Programme Management Director, Silicon Highway. “The technology works, but the operational model hasn’t changed. Moving from pilots to scale means redesigning workflows, not just automating them. You can prove a concept technically, but unless you change how a service operates, you don’t create real value.” That distinction is becoming central to how cities approach AI. It is no longer enough to demonstrate that a tool can produce better analysis. The real test is whether it can change how decisions are made,