Ilsur Metshin on artificial intelligence: “This is an inevitable evolutionary way that modern cities need to go through together”

The Kazan Digital Week 2023 International Forum continues in the capital of Tatarstan. A round table took place at the Kazan Expo with the participation of Ilsur Metshin, the Mayor of the city. Representatives of municipalities, including the Mayor of Ulan-Ude Igor Shutenkov, the Deputy Governor of Yugra of Khanty-Mansiysk region Pavel Tsiporin, the Mayor of Innopolis Ruslan Shagaleev and others shared the best practices in the digitalization of city management.

Welcoming the participants, Ilsur Metshin noted that the round table brought together representatives from different countries: Belarus, China, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iran and Turkmenistan. The Mayor of Kazan noted that artificial intelligence (AI) is being implemented in all areas today, including in municipal administration. This allows employees not to waste time on routine processes, but to concentrate on more complex and creative tasks.

Ilsur Metshin cited the Chinese city of Hangzhou as the place where the AI-based system City Brain is used. It collects and integrates operational data from residents, city authorities and businesses.

Another good example is Moscow whose AI experience is carefully studied by Kazan. The priority areas were smart speech recognition and text generation “on the fly”.

“We are trying to keep up with our Moscow colleagues and last year we introduced the Era digital communications platform developed by the Kazan company. It allows to replace foreign telephony for more than 2 thousand employees of the Kazan Municipality and modernize the unified duty and dispatch service of the city,”- the Mayor said.

According to Ilsur Metshin, the AI platform allowed the creation of voice assistants who independently take meter readings, applications for snow removal, trapping stray animals and advise on the most important issues for residents, for example, preschool education.

In 2022, the CitySoft information system was introduced in Kazan in order to increase the automation of processes in the landscaping. Twenty-five city buses are equipped with devices that allow to monitor the situation on the city's road network. Snow–covered roads, the absence of road signs and road imperfections - such data is recorded by the system.

He paid special attention to the introduction of new projects using AI. A digital twin of the city is being created. An accurate three-dimensional model will allow to see how the urban infrastructure functions, how a new building will fit into it, as well as assess the quality of the layout of new territories and calculate the necessary costs.

“The introduction of AI will require new knowledge and skills from our employees, we will have to learn how to use technology, which today is only forming the practice of application and causes an ambiguous attitude in most people. But this is an inevitable evolutionary way that modern cities need to go through together,”- summed up the Mayor of the capital of the republic of Tatarstan.