The Evolution of Smart Cities and Utilities in the US

Mobility, water, air quality, street lighting... Using digital and connected technology to monitor and manage city infrastructure more efficiently as well as improve services has already reached a kind of maturity. In the US, cities of all sizes have deployed or at least piloted some sort of smart city or utility solution in one capacity or another. So in times of a more established ecosystem, how are the smart city and utility industries evolving in the United States? In the past, the smart city industry in the US focused the narrative on how technology could help city and service providers become more efficient, which is the purpose of smart cities. But the narrative has changed, and now they're focusing on expressing how it will improve and change resident experience. This is really about the citizens. It's about helping to create value for citizens. It's about helping to make sure that the services that we're delivering for citizens is very efficient. And if you look from the perspective of city leaders, they're worried about making sure that they have enough money to be able to balance their budgets, they want to make sure that they're able to provide some of the best services to the cities. So over time, the conversation has really moved away from technology to more putting the citizens at the center. We've seen this as well for utilities. For years, they focused and continue to focus on having a reliable grid and enough production. But now it's also about bringing sensors to the grid edge, which in many cases means clients homes. From smart meters to smart panels that gather data on what uses energy specifically and how much of it, allowing the utility to better understand the needs of customers by getting granular data from the grid edge to ensure good services. We saw it at DTech. What we also saw a lot of this year was wildfire prevention tech, the deployment of which is growing rapidly with, for example, major projects like Alert California. PanoAI is now in ten states in the US. We also deployed in Canada, and we're in five states in Australia. The team has gone from about 60 people, 55 to 60 people to almost 100 people globally. If I think about the footprint itself, we've been significantly expanding our network. And this is the big news, which is around that time (a year ago), we probably had 180 or so deployments, physical locations, we call them stations, around the world. Now we are almost at 300, and we expect to get that to 500 by the summer. These are all committed that we're all working on. The kind of risk that they can mitigate. One of the fires can cost tens of billions of dollars. Insured loss, legal battles, all those liabilities and these systems cost fraction of that. Utilities are also showing their importance in smart cities. At the Smart City Expo USA, New York City, out of be around 20 booths that were exhibiting at the event, we found Cisco presenting a vision AI security system that relied on the streetlight infrastructure and Sand technologies, which work closely with water utilities. The industry is starting to understand that to make the city smart, utilities must also play the game, as they can provide crucial infrastructure for smart solutions. Utilities must play the game. However, they're still playing in different teams. US local governments are still choosing to work in a siloed system. Outside the US - Europe, Middle East - smart cities typically is a holistic approach, right? Taking all the verticals, data silos bring them together. In the US, things are still sort of verticalized. So it's kind of siloed. It's, disaggregated, it's verticalized. But it's good because, solution vendors like myself and others are able to go deep into the vertical, understand the specific challenge, and then come up with solutions to address that challenge. I think really like focusing on having one central platform that doesn't always work because the way that you see agencies work, there's so many different teams that need something that's specifically tailored to their needs. So it's really getting their data into the platform that works for them and having a view that's tailored to how they're operating. So it takes and smooths out all of the different bumps in your every day. Most U.S agencies are funded through department budgets, whether it's through state or federal grants or city budgets. They can also be funded through revenue sources like traffic fees. Grants are allocated individually to each department so they each focus on their own projects. Working like this may lead to departments missing out on key information about who is working on what, and whether certain solutions and data can be used for more than one department. It will be key to keep a stream of information going. This is where AI which is obviously also a trend in the US,like in the rest of the world, with many vision AI or generative AI solutions, could come in handy to process all the data and share with different departments. AI is touching everything across the board, right? And it's critical because I think there was a day in time when IoT was critical. It was the idea of connecting sensors, cameras, flood monitors, temperature sensors from a public safety perspective, crowd detection. Get all that data in. The challenge I think cities ran into is they collected all this data, but they couldn't get value from that data. What we're seeing in New York City is really like a push towards automating and improving things that they're already doing. So in terms of smart cities, that goes into like AI, machine learning, thinking about things on a 3D level, a digital twin that really helps your operation, that helps you manage your transportation networks, manage your people on the ground, improves how you do asset management, etc. The US follows many trends that are also key in other regions, like those around environmental monitoring or the use of different types of AI. But when it comes to development, what is sure is that it's advancing in a different manner. Keeping departments separate. Those looking to do business in the US will have to adapt to the way things work, and consider how cities and municipalities get their funding, the narrative and the pains of the US market. This will be more important than following a trend. With the new administration trends could change. They could also change with the tariff situation, which could also worsen the pilots overuse in a country where cities and municipalities excessively claim a need for pilots that go on for over a year all to then decide not to fully deploy despite having seen good results. Smart city companies will have to look for creative ways of funding, make adoption easier for municipalities resistant to change, prove an ROI post-scaling and become stricter in pilot periods and agreements to change the over use of pilots.