By: Chelsea McCullough

For years, cities have been told that seeing is believing. As a result, dashboards became the emblem of the “smart city” era: elegant, real-time displays that promised transparency, efficiency, and better decisions. But visibility is not the same as intelligence. 

Monitoring congestion, permitting delays, cyber anomalies, or emergency calls are important first steps, but anticipating issues, coordinating and automating responses are often the next-level support that is needed. 

These important issues will be addressed in the panel, “From Smart to Cognitive: Why Cities Must Move Beyond Dashboards” at Smart Cities Connect this September 22 – 24. The panel captures a shift already underway in public-sector technology: from systems that report what happened to systems that help predict what will happen next. 

Human intelligence is the most critical aspect of the Cognitive City. AI is integrated as a way to  support human decision making. Instead of intelligence sitting on top of operations, AI is embedded into workflows and service delivery so that municipalities can better understand and allocate resources more intelligently. The result is improved response times related to the key issues of concern.  

Teena Piccione is a fitting voice for this conversation. As the former Secretary and State CIO for North Carolina, she led statewide technology strategy across cybersecurity, AI, broadband, and digital services. She built her public sector career upon years of experience at global technology companies including Google, RTI International, and AT&T giving her a rare fluency in both public mission delivery and private-sector transformation. 

Cities are continuously operating in an environment of rising demand and constrained capacity. It is easy to overinvest in visibility but underinvest in intelligence. Dashboards are an important translator for complex data, but what lies beneath is as, if not more, important. Critical to the conversation is clear accountability, privacy protections, and bias controls. A cognitive city is not one that simply collects more data. It is one that uses data responsibly to produce better outcomes.

The evolution from smart to cognitive is ultimately a shift from observation to foresight. Cities that embrace it will be better positioned to anticipate disruption, improve service delivery, and strengthen resilience. Those that do not may find themselves with impressive dashboards that inform but offer too little operational intelligence. 

So what are the next steps to move towards creating a Cognitive City? Attend Smart Cities Connect September 22 – 24 in National Harbor, MD. In addition to this insightful, informative talk by Teena Piccione, the schedule is packed with information and opportunity to connect knowledge to human networks. Join us and please share with your colleagues!