Future World Forum

Smart cities 1 min read

Dubai second in BCG's Intelligent Cities Index

A three-step podium in cut paper ringed by small tower shapes

Boston Consulting Group published its Intelligent Cities Index for the first time in July 2026, scoring 61 cities across 39 countries on how far they have got with digital technology and AI in practice rather than on paper. London came first, Dubai second, New York third, Washington DC fourth and Amsterdam fifth.

The index is built from 35 indicators grouped into five domains — outcomes, strategy, adoption, ways of working and enablers — covering 14 dimensions of digital transformation. Dubai's second place overall rests on a first place in one domain in particular: adoption, where it puts more smart-city use cases into live service than any other city measured.

Digital Dubai's director general, Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, tied the result to a decade of treating digital transformation and AI as government strategy rather than as procurement.

Adoption is the interesting column for anyone attending a smart-city conference here. Plenty of cities score well on strategy documents; the gap between a published roadmap and a system a resident actually touches is where most municipal technology dies. A city that leads on deployment is a city where a pilot has somewhere to go afterwards — which is the practical reason vendors and planners keep booking flights to Dubai for this category of event.

Source: Dubai Media Office checked against the source

More Dubai news

A torn periwinkle paper band across a deep indigo ground with a small cream marker standing at each end

AI

Two questions, one trial

A Nature Biotechnology paper proposes measuring biological age inside ordinary disease trials, using blood already drawn, and sets out what regulators would need first.

A row of small paper squares of the same size on a deep blue ground, most of them pale blue and two of them cream

AI

Claude's text carries a watermark now

Since 2 August every new Claude model has been marking what it writes, using a keyed pattern in its own word choices. The detector is deliberately not public.

A long periwinkle paper ribbon looping across a deep indigo ground, a small lilac square riding on it

Mobility

Four million driverless kilometres

The RTA puts the programme past four million kilometres with 97 per cent customer satisfaction — a pairing that says more about the service than either figure alone.