Interview: How AI can help cities achieve resilience goals

In this interview, Hannah Prior, National Resilience Lead, WW Public Sector at Microsoft, explains how AI is transforming climate resilience, urban planning, and city operations.

Hannah explores why understanding the natural environment is essential for managing the built environment, and how AI is giving city leaders a real‑time “finger on the pulse” of everything from energy grids and air pollution to traffic flows. She highlights the Sentinel Hubs project in Western Australia as a leading example of dynamic master planning – moving beyond static plans toward continuously updated, signals‑based insights that reflect what’s really happening on the ground.

The conversation also covers:

• How AI can help address the loss of institutional knowledge in large organisations like city governments
• The role of AI copilots and agents in giving small planning teams access to virtual domain experts (e.g. hydrologists, geologists)
• Why turnkey AI solutions are lowering the barrier to advanced analytics, especially for rural and under‑resourced communities
• Emerging innovations such as low‑cost, 3D‑printed environmental sensors for monitoring air quality, water quality, and heat stress, and enabling life‑saving automated alerts.

Together, these developments point to a future where cities of all sizes can make smarter, faster, and more resilient decisions using AI‑driven environmental and infrastructure insights.