A core tenet of LOTI’s work is that we want to help connect London boroughs with leading practice and thought-provoking examples of the use of tech, data and innovation from around the world.

Three members of the LOTI team, Eddie, Genta and Sarbjit, reflect on some of the most interesting city innovation examples.

Eddie: The highlight for me was joining sessions of the Council of Global City CIOs (CGCC), a forum for city Chief Innovation Officers, hosted by Bloomberg Associates. We explored topics including innovation, digital governance, AI and regulatory experimentation.

Michael Donaldson, CIO of our host city, Barcelona, outlined local work to introduce a regulatory sandbox to test innovations in mobility, pollution and infrastructure. The idea is that certain parts of the city can temporarily override local regulations in a limited and controlled manner to enable citizens and startups to develop and test new solutions, taking advantage of the city’s physical and digital assets and real-time data. It chimed with LOTI’s approach to creating safe spaces to trial new service models, like our own Sandbox method.

Equally interesting were different cities’ approaches to thinking about the use of drones for public good. Dublin is well known for having pioneered this work, developing lots of guidance and regulations with their aviation authority. The Hague too is looking at municipal uses. As a group, we discussed the potential advantages of drone use for checking the safety of buildings and other physical infrastructure like bridges, delivering urgent medical supplies and monitoring traffic flows in real time. Like nearly all new uses of technology, engaging residents in a conversation about how they feel about drones flying overhead is vital, both to discuss safety but also balancing the pros and cons of convenience over noise and intrusion.

Genta: In a strange way, being part of these international conversations is sometimes comforting.  Hearing that other cities face similar challenges to ours—whether it’s climate change, social housing, digital exclusion and so on—makes you realise we’re not alone. These are some of the biggest issues of our time, and they’re global.

This year, I was delighted to be invited as a speaker following Get Online London‘s Governance and Economy World Smart City Award win last year. It was both a privilege and genuinely humbling to join an international discussion about how digital innovation can support our wellbeing in the years ahead. My presentation explored how digital technologies can enhance social care and wellbeing—not by replacing human connection, but by enabling it in new ways.

While I was there to share our LOTI experiences, some of the most valuable moments came from hearing what others are doing. Unsurprisingly, there’s never a shortage of impressive ideas and technologies at these conferences—far too many to cover here. But a few examples really stood out.

Dublin‘s use of theatre to raise awareness and upskill people on the importance of cyber security was particularly impressive. At LOTI, we’ve used immersive theatre to bring real Londoners’ journeys through the health and social care system to life, but we hadn’t thought about using this approach for education and training. Definitely one for us to consider—and I’d recommend checking out the Dublin Smart City team’s website for more of their work.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government also showcased some brilliant initiatives. Their youth-centred AI Hackathon, as part of Smart Life Week, was designed to uncover practical public AI ideas while building effective employment and start-up support structures—a great way to inject fresh thinking into wicked problems. Equally impressive was Seoul’s AI Companion Bus, a mobile experiential education service where elderly people can directly engage with seven AI-based technologies, including healthcare and robotics. It’s the kind of initiative that could have potential to support our social care system here in the UK.

Sarbjit: It was really good to meet other cities from around the world and learn where they are on their AI journey.

I was grateful for the opportunity to deep dive with the Ayuntamiento de Madrid (Council of Madrid) to talk about the great work they are doing and some of the areas they are focusing on to use AI to improve citizen services. 

Over the last 14 months, the Council of Madrid has had an AI working group called MAIA (Madrid Intelligent) , a group of over 90 people, which includes service owners from public services like transport, mobility, and environmental care. The purpose of this group is to develop use cases that might be suitable for AI. They are pushing the boundaries of what could be possible through the use of AI and a sign of their maturity is that over 60% of submitted and analysed use cases were deemed non-viable, primarily due to lack of current data or insufficient technology maturity. It’s impressive to me that they are able to connect so many service owners together and are able to get them to work collaboratively on this task.

MAIA operates through a four-stage process: First, sharing experiences of the service owners. Second, providing a method to analyse use cases – where the successful ones lead to proof of concepts. Third, internal communication to the group, and then finally external communication about the AI projects to private companies. This process has developed 16 use cases and provided over 50 systems with embedded AI.

One use case that caught my attention was their ‘Tax Lab’ which analyses a large volume of taxpayer and social data to help design new, more equitable taxes. They use AI to create simulations of new taxes to see what the impact is on certain profiles of people and to find gaps or incorrect information in tax data. 

The use cases developed by MAIA have been focused on saving time. MAIA tracks how staff previously dedicated to tasks now handled by AI can be moved to other areas, such as attending to older people or those with special needs. They plan to publish mature figures on this in about a year.

Final thoughts

In London we’re incredibly fortunate to have an incredible community of boroughs who actively share their best practice with each other. Yet our reference point for what’s possible should always look to leading practice wherever it can be found.