Smart City Expo World Congress Barcelona 2024

Last year's edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona was the biggest the city had experienced.
With over 1,000 exhibitors and more than 25,000 attendees, there were discussions around the role of telcos, about smart city strategies, platforms... and obviously AI.
Everywhere we looked, artificial intelligence was the protagonist.
To know what main trends and topics will be discussed during this year's edition, we've come to the Smart City Expo World Congress offices to talk to Ugo Valenti, director of the event, Ione Ruete and Delphine Romeu from Tomorrow.Building and Tomorrow.Mobility as they work on the finishing touches of the event.
This 2024 edition, the most important thing, really, is that, the event is growing so much.
There's a 30% increase in the exhibition space in relation to last edition.
On one end, there will be plenty of new advances in relation to, artificial intelligence and how it's being applied towards improvement of our technologies, of the data that we gather, there will be plenty of novelties in relation to energy and energy efficiency.
And of course, as usual, we have a plethora of wonderful speakers, at the event, over 600 of them, coming from all over the world.
So there will be plenty of networking discussions and learning to be done.
What I like the most of our event is that there's a huge presence of cities and governments at the exhibition area itself.
So they are showcasing the projects, what the cities are doing.
But at the same time, they are giving the opportunity to the small companies and the SMEs that are giving service to them to be showcased all over the world.
We are doing a big work in order to attract the mobility managers from cities.
For instance, from Miami, that's going to participate this year, from Abu Dhabi, from Austin, from Amsterdam, from Milan, from Rome.
All these cities will be represented with the mobility person.
So that's something new in comparison with other editions.
We are getting to higher representatives from the mobility sector.
This year’s newness is that we worked really hard in order to build a super Innovation Playground.
And in this Innovation Playground we will have some startups, more than 100 startups are going to exhibit.
In this Innovation Playground, we're going to have a demo area with all the latest innovations. still prototypes or pilots, but we’re going to have for instance, a surgery shuttle there, robots to empower and to improve the management of last mile logistics, we're going to have solution for bikes both regarding parking and charging, for instance.
We are so excited for our second edition.
And this year, particularly, Tomorrow.Building Congress has grown a lot.
We'll have over 2000m² of space, 100 speakers, 30 sessions.
The smart building industry is experiencing significant growth.
Thus, in the coming years we’ll see an increasing number of buildings adopting these technologies like, artificial intelligence, digital twins, or IoT to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon footprint.
Once again, this event promises new trends and innovation.
And on our side, we promise a new format.
The Smart Deal, in which you'll be able to see six smart city startups pitching their ideas and their company to a jury of VCs and industry experts.
And of course, we will also be bringing you all the insights coming out of this event.