In this interview, Constellation Insights host Larry Dignan talks with Jonathan Reichental, founder of Human Future and former city official, about how AI and autonomous technologies are reshaping municipal governments. Reichental explains that city leaders are currently focused on learning what AI is, how generative AI works, and what peer cities are doing. He stresses a problem‑first approach rather than jumping straight to AI solutions, and notes that most public‑sector clients prefer off‑the‑shelf, cloud‑based AI services over building custom systems, though experimental pilots are emerging in places like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. He outlines key AI use cases for cities—reducing bureaucracy, improving accuracy, enabling self‑service, and cutting costs—while highlighting the transformative impact of autonomous vehicles, drones, and IoT sensors on urban design. Reichental cites real‑world examples such as the pedestrian‑focused redesign of Times Square in New York and the ongoing re‑imagining of the Champs‑Élysées in Paris, arguing that autonomous vehicles will free up parking space, enable more green areas, and require cities to plan proactively rather than reactively. He contrasts the profit‑driven motives of the private sector with the public‑service focus of municipalities, concluding that AI and autonomous tech will accelerate city modernization faster than many anticipate, and urging city leaders to start planning now.
Chapters
Foreign.
Hi, I'm Larry Dignan with Constellation Insights. And we're here with Jonathan Reichentl. He is founder of Human Future, author, professor, few other things I'm forgetting. Hey, Jonathan, thanks for joining us.
Thanks, Larry. It's good to be here.
So you're in the AI space. You're consulting with a lot of clients. What are you seeing in the field right now?
Yeah, it's the hot topic for sure. Like that's obvious. And dominating all the work that's coming inbound to my business are questions about AI. I work with a lot of cities, as many people know. That's one of my big client bases. Cities here in the US and around the world, governments more broadly. And the dominant thing I'm seeing is more knowledge seeking, more knowledge questions about. They want to educate their leadership about what AI is, what generative AI is, what it can do for them. They want to know what others are doing. This is very important question is, tell us what other cities are doing. What are, what are other governments doing here in the US and abroad? There are some other engagements where the question is being asked, how do we apply AI against this problem? Should we think about AI? I'm still of the opinion, I'm old school. I've been doing this about 30 years. You know, let's look at the problem and figure out the right solution for it. You know, let's not start with the solution like what should we do with AI? But more so, what are the problems you're trying to solve? What's the strategy or business where you're trying to go? And can AI be an accelerator? Can it be an amplifier? Can it make things easier, lower cost, make it faster? You know, your typical things. And so those are the kind of deep, valuable conversations and activities that I'm seeing right now.
So one of the things that have come up in the technology space, the enterprise technology space, is this concept, you know, companies or organizations that are looking to DIY their AI versus sort of buy it off the shelf. You know, up until now, or up until recently, it's been more of the DIY crowd. You know, you're talking to cities, public sector folks. What is the appetite for DIY or buying something prepackaged or We.
Yeah, no, it's such a neat question and an insightful one. You know, if I do focus a little bit on the public sector here for, for a moment, that's, you know, because it's such a big part of my world, there's still more of an emphasis on off the shelf. You Know, and so what you're seeing is everyone's seeing this, you're seeing this too. Every vendor is, has sort of an AI strategy. Every product, you know, know, particularly cloud based solutions, SaaS solutions, they suddenly are AI powered or have AI capabilities. I think most people now would, would view any company that wasn't saying that or doing something as sort of what, why aren't you, you know, there's that element of it. So I think very much in the public sector we're still seeing sort of carry on of a normal behavior which is we use, you know, traffic management systems or permitting systems, legislative systems and the vendors are sort of saying we're now AI enabling this bit or you can do the first draft using AI, you know, so there's still still a, a lot of, a lot of that. Now some cities in the world, you know, get the very progressive cities often now in, in the Middle east, in the Gulf states and UAE and, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia trying, you know, their own custom solutions and they are engaging, you know, high quality providers. But it's still, I would argue probably that's more in the experimental phase in a broad sense. And so to your question, I think we're still, I think that the customer here, the public client is relying on off the shelf sort of you provide and you tell me what you're going to do that's going to make these services more efficient rather than cities being highly proactive in saying we're going to build AI driven solutions. Given my own long, many years of experience in public service, I actually think that's probably a wise path right now. Many will know and remember that I was a big advocate for cities moving to the cloud because governments and cities shouldn't necessarily be in the data center business. They're not particularly good at it. And there's a role, there's a small role, but generally, you know, cities should focus on their core competencies and sort of subscribe to technology as a service. And that's actually been a big benefit. Cities have greatly benefited from cloud solutions. So I think we're going to see more of that with AI baked in rather than the custom path, certainly for the sort of short to medium term time horizon.
So what do you think the use cases look like over time for, for cities, is it a case of delivering services faster? Is it saving money? Is it, I guess. How does it look different than the private sector?
Well, those that you mentioned, better, cheaper always matter, right? Absolutely. There's two ways I would think about this question. One is that we can always do what we're doing better. You know, that there we can lower bureaucracy, we can increase accuracy, you know, reduce errors, make more self service. Because the ongoing joke is nobody wakes up in the morning, you know, a community member and says, I can't wait, I'm going to spend the day at a, at a city facility filling out paperwork. I mean, this is just something nobody wants to do. And yet we still have to do a lot of that. We are in this kind of massive global digital transformation of, of government services, no doubt. And in many places they're getting so much better. So, so we need to enable people to get what they need quickly, seamless, on a smartphone. You know, like they do stuff in the, in the private sector. So there's a lot of momentum behind that. Digitalization of government continues very rapidly and AI, I think, is just really a big part of that. That's so that's one way of answering the question. The other way of answering the question is what's new? What's different? And I think about autonomous vehicles and drones. Autonomous drones, changing the landscape of cities. If I focus solely on autonomous vehicles, this is a really big deal. You know, it's not just about cars that drive themselves. That is a very narrow way of thinking about what's coming. Cities can completely change how they're designed, how they work. You know, do we need a grid system with autonomous vehicles or traffic signals or parking spaces or parking lots? All of this changes, even car ownership changes. And cities are going to be the most complex and biggest entity impacted by that because they've been built, sadly for most of the 20th and 21st century to reflect the needs of cars that we drive themselves. So sorry that cars that we drive, not cars that drive themselves. Right. So we're not seeing it yet because it's really early. But as Waymo really spins up in San Francisco and other cities, Tesla's cyber cabs now being touted coming in a few years, there's plenty of other vendors coming. There will be a snowball effect over time where we're transitioning from gas powered car ownership ourselves to on demand electric autonomous vehicles. And my sense is, having been in tech and innovation for, you know, over three decades, is this will probably happen faster than most people anticipate and cities are going to have to reflect that. The last point I might make just in terms of looking at technology is the impact of the Internet of things right today. They're the, the biggest context for connected devices are cities and everything from simple things like detecting Air quality, you know, down to, you know, security systems, having dynamic traffic signaling systems that only change from, you know, red to green when based on the volume of traffic and the, and the, and the sort of flow of traffic rather than being on a timer system, you know, and you know, ways to measure the quality of water to do things like manage better the demand and supply of energy. So as we deploy these lower cost sensors into our urban landscape, again, cities have to respond. There'll be new technologies, more digitalization and of course AI is going to be part of all of that that I just spoke about. So those to me are the two sort of parallel tracks that we're going to see in our communities. Now, I didn't answer the last part. I always feel that I have to answer every part of your question. You asked how does it differ from the private sector? The quick answer to that is different drivers altogether. Right. Cities don't have any profit motive. There's, you know, the incentives are different. So you're going to see very different things happening in the private. A completely reinvention of businesses, you know, businesses going obsolete and we won't experience that in our cities.
And as far as the redesign of the city due to autonomous vehicles.
Yeah.
How do you see that playing out? And I guess how long is that? I mean we are still early, right? We're, we're basically what, two cities that are doing the autonomous vehicle thing. But does that mean more green spaces to walk in? Does that mean more parks? Does that mean, I guess what does, how do you see that playing out exactly?
Yeah, this is a big deal. Yeah, this is a very big deal. And it's actually an area that I have some concerns around in that cities are not yet prioritizing this as a, as a topic to be beginning to plan around, continue to, starting to assess what this might all mean. You know, one of the most sort of fun examples of this is when, if, if a city is building a parking lot today, a multi story parking lot, perhaps it should be built with the notion that it can be converted to housing in the future. Right. And you might build it differently because of that. If your multi story parking lot is going to have a lifespan of, I'm going to make it up 15 years, maybe 20 years. What are you going to do, tear it down? It'd be cool to be able to easily convert it to homes. So that's part of how we might start to think about the engineering of cities as a consequence. I think the impact is going to be massive and I fear that like other big technologies and societal trends that have come in the past, cities will, will be reactive and will play catch up and that'll, that'll be messy. So there, there's, there's work to be done now. And as I sort of alluded to a little earlier, I do think it's going to happen faster than, than people anticipate. And I don't remember the other part of your question.
Oh, it was just how, how does the city get redesigned? Is it more green space, more walking?
Yes, yes, yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, is the answer to that. I mean, we're already seeing it. I mean, there's some fantastic work being done in, in cities all over the US and, and around the world to, to, to think about major thoroughfares. You know, there's the, the work that was done, you know, look at Times Square today, you know, in New York City. Anyone who's gone to Times Square over the last couple of decades, it's transformed. It's mostly pedestrian now. It's a completely different dynamic. That was a, you know, bold and ambitious by a former mayor and team, but they took a take, they took a risk and it's paying off in spades. The other big project that is notable, there are many, but the one that is worth mentioning is the redesign of Paris. You know, here you have one of the most beautiful cities of the world, a planned city. The Champs Elysees is the main thoroughfare. And over the last few last decade or so, it has become noisy and dangerous and transportation vehicles have dominated the landscape. Well, the, the city and its leadership said there must be a different way. I mean, we're losing our way of life and this is, this is no way to live. This is no way to have a beautiful boulevard operate. So they've already started to, to redesign it and in fact, I believe there's even some construction underway to sort of shift the priority from vehicles to people. And I call it giving the city back to people. And, and so it means, you know, rerouting major traffic, you know, stopping, for example, trucks and things going in certain areas, making the roads narrower and, and adding a lot more green trees, grass, you know, even vegetable gardens and fruit gardens and things are going to build on this major thoroughfare. And as that, you know, gets done and there's good results, they will begin to implement that in, in many of the archeries heading into the Champs Elysees and then wider and wider into into Paris. Now, will autonomous vehicles have be a factor here? Hugely, hugely. And, and I hope that those that are thinking about these big sort of redesigned projects will, will not only acknowledge that people want more, we want more place, making more beautiful areas to, to be part of our cities, but also that the nature which people move around is going to change too. And, and, and so you might not need to put, for example, a multi story parking lot beside a new park because people don't have to drive there. Right. They can be dropped off or you know, we haven't spoken about light rail and bicycles. Those are also things that are happening at quite a velocity right now in terms of their implementation. So yeah, look, I definitely am an optimist and I would say that the introduction of autonomous vehicles will allow us to do many things we want to do and we definitely want to try to green our cities. And city leaders all over the US and all over the world have recognized that and are doing extremely exciting work to transform many, many parts of the cities that were just not optimized for people.
