Key Smart City Trends From Smart Cities Connect 2026

During this year’s Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo in Raleigh, NC, one topic garnered considerable attention: AI. Within many city governments, AI is past experimentation and has moved into production. In 2026, city IT leaders are prioritizing  safe, secure, and data-driven AI deployments that deliver measurable outcomes in mobility, public safety, infrastructure management, and climate resilience.

However, as cities move toward operational AI, challenges exist around data readiness, governance, and integration across departments.

Data and AI Governance

In 2026, data governance and cross-department collaboration are foundational to successful AI adoption in cities.

IT Leaders from the City of Raleigh emphasized that their biggest challenge for AI adoption is managing massive data sets that often lack consistent metadata or structure. For AI to generate insights, cities must find better ways to clean, organize, and prepare their data. Other sessions highlighted efforts to decentralize access to government data using AI tools, but that preparing data for ingestion is extremely time-consuming.

In Washington, DC, a similar picture emerges with challenges around finding meaningful data; with 80 district agencies and a plethora of data coming in, the District’s goal is to have data dashboards that actually enhance decision-making and give insights into anomalies. 

When it comes to AI governance, cities are implementing policies to ensure AI systems are deployed responsibly, with clear standards for privacy, transparency, and cybersecurity. Municipal leaders emphasized that governance frameworks are essential for building public trust and enabling AI to scale across government operations. 

Mayor Pro Tem from the Town of Cary, NC, Lori Bush, highlighted the need for clear policy governance, with emphasis on good data and data governance. She mentioned the importance of being able to inventory all the tools that already have AI built into them and how the town is actually using them.

Mayor Michael Owens, of the newly established City of Mableton, Georgia, said his city is building its government as a digital-first, AI-ready municipality from the start. Leaders have already embedded GenAI policies into employee guidelines to ensure responsible use.

As cities continue to modernize infrastructure and services, AI will play a pivotal role, but success will depend on strong data foundations, interoperable platforms, and responsible governance. Companies in this space can expect increasing demand for data readiness solutions, including data cleaning, normalization, and metadata management. Cities are looking for partners who can operationalize fragmented data and make it usable for AI rather than simply building models on top of it.

Cities will be looking for help implementing AI governance frameworks, including data privacy, access control and compliance. As AI scales, ensuring transparency, security, and responsible use will be key.

Computer Vision Is Delivering Immediate ROI

When we think about AI, generative AI often comes to the forefront. However, computer vision, another critical subset of AI, has been delivering substantial value across municipalities.

Many cities operate hundreds or thousands of cameras supporting traffic systems and public safety. In the past, operators monitored all these feeds manually. Today, AI is capable of providing an additional intelligence layer that can detect incidents and patterns in real time, ultimately enhancing public safety outcomes in ways that were not previously possible. 

The CIO of the City of Raleigh, Mark Wittenburg, shared how AI is supporting Raleigh’s Vision Zero strategy to reduce traffic fatalities. Their system was initially deployed to count vehicles and improve intersections, and is now more advanced, using vision-language models to analyze video feeds.

Hillary Orr, Deputy Director of Transportation for the City of Alexandria, Virginia, highlighted the city’s 20+ year old smart mobility program. The city built out a foundational infrastructure layer and a connected infrastructure layer, with the ultimate goal of a virtual city layer where applications can interact with one another and provide insights that they wouldn’t typically be able to get due to data siloes.

In 2026, city leaders are optimistic about these new technology capabilities and hope to utilize computer vision to analyze events such as vehicles entering crosswalks while pedestrians are present, near-misses involving cyclists, red-light violations, and stalled vehicles causing congestion.

Demand will continue to rise for solutions that demonstrate clear and fast ROI, especially in traffic safety and congestion reduction. Cities expect platforms that go beyond basic metrics and provide behavioral insights that directly inform infrastructure changes. With cities already operating large camera networks, IT companies will see strong demand for AI layers that turn video into actionable insights. The focus is shifting toward real-time event detection, situational awareness, and measurable safety outcomes, particularly tied to initiatives like Vision Zero.

Drones, Digital Twins, and Smart Infrastructure

In 2026, emerging technologies are also widening the reach of smart city applications. Drones are gaining momentum as cities look for new and innovative ways to monitor infrastructure and enhance inspections.

The City of Detroit and its partnerships around the Michigan Central Innovation District are exploring drone operations, autonomous vehicles, and new urban airspace infrastructure. The city highlighted one advancement that is particularly promising: Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone operations that allow drones to travel beyond the operator’s field of view. This capability has major advantages to improve building maintenance, infrastructure inspections, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. Scaling these systems requires modern digital infrastructure that can safely manage urban airspace.

As regulations evolve, companies can expect growing interest in scalable drone operations, particularly for inspections, asset monitoring, and public safety. Cities will be looking for partners who can support safe, compliant, and infrastructure-ready deployments, including beyond visual line of sight capabilities. 

At the same time, cities are looking to Digital Twin technology to model infrastructure systems and support resilience efforts. By combining sensor data with AI analytics, digital twins can allow municipalities to simulate traffic flows, manage stormwater systems, and coordinate emergency response during extreme weather events.

For example, the City of Raleigh is collecting large amounts of environmental data through rain gauges and stream sensors. During severe weather events, this data can be fed into digital twin models to enhance decisions around reservoir water release, road closures due to flooding, and emergency response coordination.

Looking ahead, demand will likely increase for platforms that help cities model, simulate, and response to real-world events. Use cases like stormwater management, flood response, and infrastructure planning are spurring adoption for Digital Twin Technology.

Cost Savings and Optimization

Another discussion topic during the conference was the need to move away from department-specific technology deployments.

Cities are increasingly pivoting towards platform-based solutions that allow multiple departments to use the same infrastructure. For example, cameras installed for traffic monitoring may also support flood detection, public safety insights, or infrastructure inspections. This shift enables cities to maximize existing investments while accelerating innovation across departments.

The City of Coral Gables spent many years building out foundational infrastructure, including a research lab to help spur innovation. Now, the city is focusing on value, cost effectiveness, and making decisions that support the taxpayers. Their challenges remains providing the same quality of services as the public sector with limited resources. 

Cities will be looking for partners who can embed intelligence into existing infrastructure, whether that’s streetlights or water systems. Solutions that support predictive maintenance, performance monitoring, and automated alerts will be key differentiators.

And as we move further along in 2026, the role of smart infrastructure will continue to gain momentum as cities prepare for largescale international events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will take place across an array of North American cities. Municipalities will be looking to deploy hybrid AI infrastructure capable of supporting real-time decision-making at scale.

IT companies in this space will see demand for solutions with edge-to-cloud computing architectures, traffic optimization systems, scenario modeling for event planning, and secure, resilient connectivity. The capabilities can help cities manage complex logistics while ensuring safe transportation for all those participating.

The Road Ahead

The 2026 Smart Cities Connect conference emphasized a major shift in how cities think about technology. Instead of asking if they should use AI, the question is now how to do so responsibly, securely, at scale, and in ways that build public trust. Interoperability across departments and municipalities is key to supporting a robust smart network of cities nationwide.

As we look ahead into the future of Smart Cities, the cities that see the most success will be those that look beyond the lens of innovation to ensure they have built a foundation of data readiness, governance, and platform-based infrastructure that support emerging technologies like AI. This will allow for clear and measurable ROI across the entire urban ecosystem. 

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About the Author: Yvonne Maffia is the senior analyst covering state, local and education markets. She applies insights and analysis to purchasing trends to help vendors and partners shorten their sales cycles. Prior to joining TD SYNNEX Public Sector, Yvonne spent 8 years working in state and local government, where she oversaw advisory boards across the State of Florida and served as an analyst to a local politician. Yvonne currently lives in Washington, DC.