The Initiative

Helping cities achieve transformative impact through AI.

Based at Cornell Tech's Urban Tech Hub in New York City, The Agentic City bridges the gap between high-level AI governance vision and on-the-ground municipal implementation.

Based at Cornell Tech's Urban Tech Hub in New York City, The Agentic City bridges the gap between high-level AI governance vision and on-the-ground municipal implementation. We help cities envision, specify, and build capabilities to address strategic AI opportunities and challenges on the horizon.

Responsible AI means AI that is Secure, Accountable, Fair, and Effective (SAFE). Signals is the initiative's foresight engine: a crowdsourced map of agentic AI arriving in cities, clustered into the trends and forecasts that set our research agenda.

01 / Foresight Define the field
02 / Experiment Catalyze innovation
03 / Govern Build accountability
04 / Platform Map pathways to scale
01 Define the field

Define the 2–3 year agentic AI agenda for cities by identifying the most important questions for strategic planning — translating global and national AI governance to the city level.

02 Catalyze experimentation

Leverage university expertise to define and support prototyping and pilots by participating cities — turning promising ideas into working demonstrations.

03 Identify governance needs

Define the frameworks, standards, and accountability mechanisms needed for responsible deployment of urban AI over the 2–3 year horizon.

04 Map platform pathways

Identify pathways from early experiments toward robust, extensible frameworks — turning isolated successes into scalable municipal capability.

Follow the research as it develops.

Signals, trends, and forecasts are updated continuously by the Agentic City research team and a network of contributors.

Explore the forecast Browse signals