How Coral Gables put AI to work 14 August 2026 by Jonathan Andrews Coral Gables has spent more than a decade integrating artificial intelligence into its infrastructure, public services and internal operations, but its approach began with a practical concern rather than a desire to become a smart city. Located in a hurricane-prone part of Florida, the city initially used intelligent systems to improve the resilience of its communications networks. It has since expanded AI into cybersecurity, public safety, traffic management, customer service and a citywide digital twin. Raimundo Rodulfo, Director of Innovation and Technology and Chief Innovation Officer for Coral Gables, tells Cities Today that his previous engineering career helped inform the city’s early adoption. “AI is not new in engineering,” he says. “I’ve been using it for over 30 years in my career.” After joining the city in 2004, Rodulfo helped develop a communications network with four layers of redundancy, encompassing fibre-optic, wireless, cellular and satellite systems. Automated failovers were introduced to protect emergency communications and services during hurricanes, power failures and other incidents. “That was our priority before we talked about smart cities and AI,” Rodulfo says. “We were talking about resiliency. We were talking about sustainability and business continuity of critical services.” From resilience to public safety The city subsequently introduced AI-powered behavioural analytics to strengthen its cyber defences before beginning to install thousands of connected sensors in 2014. Computer vision technology was used to classify vehicles, objects and pedestrians, with the resulting information feeding into Coral Gables’ Community Intelligence Centre. One early demonstration came during a downtown event attended by around 50,000 people in 2015. After a couple reported their six-year-old child missing, police contacted the centre and an engineer located the child within two minutes using AI-supported image analysis. “We used AI morphological analytics