How AI can help cities improve mobility planning

Well, you mentioned trust and obviously trustworthy AI, a very, very big issue.

And there's been a lot of polling and surveys around just trust.

regular people and if they're positive or negative on AI and how much they trust them.

Right now, the general populace is not necessarily there or split in some ways.

What are some of the ways of building more trust in the data and AI?

Yeah, and I think that it's not going to be an immediate thing, and neither should it be.

If you pull up Gemini today, it's written right across the bottom, Gemini can make mistakes, please double check.

And I think that that should be true for the foreseeable future.

Right now, for instance, in Google Earth, we're investing in geospatial analysis that should look very familiar to many people who work in that field.

even though we also launched Earth with Gemini, which is a chat bot that can do sort of similar things in parallel.

And I think that those sort of traditional methods and AI methods will have to run in parallel for a while to gain that trust over time.

As you say, I'm doing this analysis here, I trust it because it's very familiar to me, and I'm doing this analysis just simply by asking a question, and those answers are the same or very similar.

I think that that's what proves it.

So it's going to take a little bit of time for people to get a little more used to things and more trustworthy.

So cities vary widely in their data maturity, their resources, and even their capacity institutionally.

From your experience, what are the biggest levers that allow a city to make meaningful action once they unlock geospatial sustainability data?

I'll come back to that collaboration piece.

I think we all sort of know that the geospatial analysis itself is just one small step of the many, many steps that it takes to get to a completed project as a public sector agency.

There's the funding that you have to get, there's the buy-in that you have to get.

And so I think that as we're thinking about AI, You know, it can be used for things like data cleaning, data analysis, interrogating the data.

It can also be used for things like generating reports and sharing things with your colleagues.

So I really think that those are the things that can be unlocked once you get past the step of using AI for geospatial analysis.

Well, and you even mentioned the democratization of it.

I did a case study once on kind of a massive slum area in Africa outside of Joburg, where essentially most of the population wasn't even counted because they weren't able to do that.

And they used geospatial analysis to basically bring those people both into the population who are counted so that they could get additional resources.