Inaugural ranking reveals the most intelligent cities

This creates a virtuous circle, said BCG: positive experiences with AI increase resident confidence, giving city leaders a further opening to enable AI more fully and provide more value to beneficiaries through new and improved intelligent city services. This value feeds yet more optimism, which drives more engagement, innovation, and scaling as the cycle repeats.

Cities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are particularly prominent in this pattern, showing the strongest genAI momentum, pairing high usage with high optimism about its future impact.

Younger, fast-growing urban populations also show especially high enthusiasm, leading disproportionately in usage and satisfaction, indicating that demographics are an important factor in helping to shape the next phase of adoption, as cities cater to current and future generations.

“AI is a key foundation of the intelligent city, and AI adoption and optimism are not confined to the ‘usual suspects’ technology hubs,” said Akram Awad, managing director and partner at BCG and co-author of the report.

“Cities around the world are creating value for residents in different ways and from different starting points. We built the Intelligent Cities Index to provide an objective, holistic view of how cities shape and enable their AI ambitions and how effectively those ambitions translate into meaningful improvements in people’s lives.”

While London tops the overall rankings, the five domains are topped as follows:

• London leads in resident outcomes
• Madrid leads in intelligent city strategy
• Dubai leads in adoption
• New York City leads in ways of working
• Amsterdam leads in enablers.

Every city in the Index has a different starting point. Several pathways forward are available, with strong outcomes and maturity stemming from either “balanced builders” diversifying strengths across domains or “focused specialists” targeting excellence in specific areas.

The report identifies several characteristics associated with stronger performance:

• AI deployment leads to better resident outcomes. Cities that are embedding AI into core intelligent services are delivering faster, stronger results
• Smart city app use and satisfaction rise together. This creates another virtuous cycle, with younger cities leading disproportionately in both usage and satisfaction
• Technology alone is insufficient. The most mature cities in the Index combine both hard enablers such as data, tech, and infrastructure with soft enablers like talent and funding
• Smart city funding and startup ecosystems drive economic activity. Focus is needed on entrepreneurship and innovation to ultimately fulfill resident expectations.

The authors conclude by detailing a roadmap that lays out the important steps toward stronger outcomes, no matter if a city is leading or lower in maturity. These include establishing clear long-term strategic priorities, strengthening governance and public-private partnerships, scaling proven AI-enabled services, and investing in data and technology platforms, infrastructure, talent, and innovation ecosystems needed to sustain intelligent city progress and transformation.

“Given today’s rapid pace of change and evolving resident expectations, building a city’s intelligent foundation, paired with focused improvement across enablers requires urgency. But city leaders and business partners don’t need to try to do everything all at once,” said Rami Mourtada, a partner and director at BCG and co-author of the report. “It’s a longer-term horizon and there is no single pathway forward. Intelligent city momentum comes from making intentional, and sometimes incremental, choices now and building for a smarter tomorrow with a clear, comprehensive roadmap.

Download the report at Intelligent Cities Index 2026: How AI Shapes Urban Living.