By: Chelsea McCullough, Strategic Advisor

Four Questions for Smart City Leaders

1 – What do you think is the biggest opportunity for smart cities in 2025? 

The biggest opportunity for smart cities in 2025 is to advance “community AI” — a transformative approach to training AI models built from public data that are truly representative and responsive to the communities they serve. By leveraging community-driven data, cities can create AI systems that reflect local priorities, nuances, and needs, ensuring that smart solutions are not only cutting-edge but also inclusive and equitable. This shift toward community AI will empower cities to address complex challenges like housing equity, public safety, climate resilience, and health access with precision and empathy.

2 – Given your enthusiasm for (insert answer from question 1) what do you think is/are the biggest obstacles to achieving that vision or goal? 

The largest obstacles to advancing community AI are building data capacity within government agencies and ensuring transparency when working with vendors. Too often, I think cities lack the internal capacity to clean, curate, and manage their data assets effectively, which is essential for developing reliable and fair AI models. Additionally, many public agencies encounter a “black box” problem when procuring AI systems from vendors, with limited visibility into the underlying methodologies, biases, and assumptions embedded in those tools. Addressing these challenges requires deliberate investment in data literacy and capacity-building within government, coupled with stronger requirements for transparency and accountability from AI vendors.

3 – Tell us about your journey to becoming a smart city leader? Did you always imagine being in this professional sector? 

I started out in neuroscience, using big data to study patterns in the brain, but I quickly realized I enjoyed working with people more than sitting in a lab. A spontaneous decision to join a design charrette for a historic downtown building in Austin instead of studying for a final exam changed everything. I met my mentor, Jana McCann, who hired me at her urban design firm during Austin’s early 2000s development boom. That’s where I fell in love with urban planning and started thinking about how new platforms like Uber and e-scooters were generating valuable data that planners just weren’t equipped to analyze.

I pitched that idea to graduate schools and landed at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where I used machine learning to predict gentrifying neighborhoods — adapting methods from neuroscience to understand urban systems. I achieved about 70% accuracy, which was pretty impressive before commercial AI was even a thing. It made me realize how powerful these tools could be for cities, and how essential it would be to ensure public oversight and accessibility to support inclusive, community-driven city-making.

Since then, I’ve been on a mission to bridge public administration and emerging tech with a “people-centred” focus. Whether it’s through my role as the Emerging Technology Division Head for San Antonio, working with the GovAI Coalition, or serving as Vice Chair of United for Smart and Sustainable Cities, my goal is always the same: making sure AI and smart city tools actually serve the communities they’re meant to help.

4 – If you could change one thing about the smart cities sector, what would that be? How would you influence the future?

If I could change one thing about the smart cities sector, it would be to demand greater transparency from the vendor community. Public agencies deserve — and should insist upon — a clear understanding of how AI systems are built, trained, and evaluated before they are integrated into critical public services. Lack of transparency can undermine community trust and compromise the effectiveness of even the most innovative solutions. This is the foundation of our “people-centred” approach in San Antonio. 

I am actively working to influence the future by promoting open standards and accountability through my leadership roles with the GovAI Coalition and United for Smart and Sustainable Cities. This includes advocating for procurement frameworks that require vendors to explain their methodologies and data sources, and supporting initiatives that build capacity within government to clean and steward their own data. Transparency must become the norm, not the exception, if we are to truly harness the power of AI to advance equity, resilience, and prosperity for all.