Expo City Dubai is building technology into its city infrastructure. In an interview with Frontier Enterprise, Nadia Verjee, its Executive Director, says deployment is only the starting point. The harder test is whether the city can use the resulting information to address real problems and make accountable decisions.
That question becomes more consequential as Expo City Dubai begins testing AI. Verjee describes an organisation still learning where the technology helps, and what needs to be in place before it can influence how the city runs.
Why are cities moving beyond standalone smart-city technologies?
We have spent a decade showing that cities can deploy complex technology. The more useful question now is whether those technologies make cities work better.
That changes the starting point. Instead of asking what technology we can install, cities are increasingly asking: “What problem are we trying to solve, and what combination of data, infrastructure, governance, and human judgement will solve it?”
Some of the hardest barriers to changing cities aren’t technological. They arise where systems meet: governance, institutional capacity, data quality, accountability, and, increasingly, questions about where human judgement ends and machine intelligence begins.
That is why the language is shifting from the “smart city” towards urban intelligence. Technology remains important, but becomes part of the city’s operating system rather than an objective in itself.
How can data, infrastructure, and governance work together more effectively?
I think of the three as a loop rather than separate layers.
Data tells us how a city is functioning. Infrastructure responds to that information and generates more of it. Governance determines what information can be collected, connected, and acted upon, and, crucially, who remains accountable for the resulting decisions.
The risk is that advanced technology operates within fragmented institutional systems. A city can have enormous quantities of data and still lack intelligence.
Trust matters across all three. People need confidence in how their data is used, institutions need confidence in its quality, and decision-makers need to understand both what the evidence shows and what it doesn’t.
Expo City Dubai’s Urban Framework aims to apply that approach to measuring city performance. It uses 131 metrics from multiple sources to assess the health of a place through environmental, social, and urban outcomes.
How do cities balance innovation with long-term operational outcomes?
Cities aren’t short of pilot projects. The difficult part is turning a successful experiment into something that can withstand procurement, regulation, budgets, political cycles, and everyday use.
I would put innovation through three fairly unsentimental tests: Does it solve a real problem? Does it measurably improve an outcome for people or the city? Can we operate and govern it over the long term?
This is where living laboratories become useful. A real city reveals things a demonstration environment cannot: behaviour, maintenance, unintended consequences, competing priorities, and cost.
The point of experimentation isn’t to prove that an idea works, but to discover the conditions under which it works and whether those conditions apply elsewhere.
What technologies underpin Expo City Dubai’s smart-city strategy?
Our starting point is the city we want people to experience, rather than the technology we want to deploy.
Expo City Dubai was designed around connectivity, sustainability, accessibility, and the principles of the 15-minute city. To support those aims, we have built digital infrastructure comprising sensors, cameras, and IoT devices across the city. These help us understand and manage buildings, energy use, mobility, environmental conditions, and city services.
Together, these systems provide a continuous stream of data on movement, energy and water consumption, security, and other aspects of city operations. That data helps us monitor and understand what is happening across the city in real time.
To return to the starting point, the city should not be designed simply to demonstrate technology. We use technology to support our goals for the city.
How is Expo City Dubai applying AI across its operations?
We are deliberately in the early stages of deploying AI. Our starting point isn’t where we can use it, but what we are trying to improve. For now, some of our most useful experiments concern how we work rather than how the city runs. We are testing AI across teams to see where it improves quality or efficiency, where it changes the way we think, and where it simply introduces another layer of work disguised as productivity.
We’ve seen all three. That matters because an organisation is a relatively safe place to learn. If an AI experiment in a workflow fails, the consequence might be lost time. The tolerance for error is very different when technology begins influencing live urban systems and people’s lives.
So we’re building familiarity with AI, practical skills, and judgement about its use: understanding the data and governance involved, where human oversight belongs, and when not to use AI.
Knowing when not to use AI may become one of the more important AI skills.
What is Expo City Dubai learning from its early AI experiments about where the technology may be useful?
One of our clearest lessons is that AI capability and AI readiness are not the same thing.
A model may technically be able to perform a task. Whether an organisation, let alone a city, has the data, permissions, cybersecurity, governance, and human capability to deploy it responsibly is another question entirely.
We see this even in our own experiments. Sometimes the technology can perform a task before the institutional infrastructure is ready to support it. Sometimes AI saves a great deal of time. Sometimes a person can do the job faster. That friction is useful because it tells us where genuine value sits.
The UAE’s ambition gives this experimentation momentum. The move towards agentic government services makes questions of infrastructure, talent, governance, and institutional readiness increasingly practical rather than theoretical.
Cities shouldn’t learn these lessons alone. Expo City Dubai convenes cities to compare what has worked, what hasn’t, and what might apply elsewhere.
The next stage of urban intelligence shouldn’t be a competition over who has deployed the most AI, but a question of where human and artificial intelligence produce better urban outcomes.
