African Cities Rank among Global AI Adopters Despite Infrastructure Deficits – THISDAYLIVE

Emma Okonji

Global cities like London, Dubai, New York City, Washington DC, and Amsterdam high the rankings of the world’s most clever cities in line with new analysis from Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Although listed cities excel in numerous areas, none of them is main throughout each area, underscoring that no metropolis has mastered each related dimension.

The report additionally revealed an fascinating city pattern throughout Africa’s main financial hubs, citing African cities like Lagos in Nigeria, Johannesburg in South Africa, Casablanca in Morocco, and Cairo in Egypt, as African cities which are excessive adopters of Artificial Intelligence (AI) expertise globally, regardless of infrastructure deficits.

While all 4 cities at present sit within the report’s “Developing” maturity tier attributable to deficits in digital infrastructure and star-tup funding, the residents of the listed African cities are among essentially the most lively and optimistic AI adopters globally, the report stated.  

The report, tagged: “BCG’s Intelligent Cities Index 2026: How AI Shapes Urban Living’, is the firm’s inaugural assessment of how 61 of the world’s biggest cities across 39 countries use technology to serve their residents and businesses. The report evaluated cities across five domains of intelligent city maturity: outcomes, strategy, adoption, ways of working, and enablers. The report is of the view that a city’s overall maturity level reflects its combined maturity across domains such as leading, accelerating, emerging, or developing.”

Addressing African’s lead in citizen’s AI urge for food, the report seen the African indices as supercharged by younger demographics, the place over 50 per cent of the inhabitants in Cairo, Casablanca, and Lagos is below the age of 35, as these cities land squarely within the “AI Enthusiasts” cohort.

According to the report, Casablanca achieved a high rating in AI adoption and good metropolis app utilization, outpacing quite a few established worldwide metropolises. 

The report additionally discovered that cities don’t want to start with or focus solely on world-class infrastructure or deep funding ecosystems to enhance resident outcomes. “Expanding clever AI-enabled metropolis providers can strengthen high quality of life and total clever metropolis maturity no matter a metropolis’s start line, demonstrating that a number of pathways exist to changing into a wiser metropolis, aligned with every metropolis’s present maturity throughout domains, “the report stated.

The report uncovered a transparent alignment between how incessantly residents use Generative AI (GenAI) instruments and the way positively they view AI’s future influence.

According to the report, residents who use AI most frequently are additionally essentially the most optimistic concerning the expertise’s potential to enhance alternative, productiveness, and high quality of life. 

“This creates a virtuous circle. Positive experiences with AI increase resident confidence, giving city leaders a further opening to enable AI more fully and provide more value to beneficiaries through new and improved intelligent city services. This value feeds yet more optimism, which drives more engagement, innovation, and scaling as the cycle repeats,” the report stated, including that cities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are significantly outstanding on this sample, exhibiting the strongest GenAI momentum, pairing excessive utilization with excessive optimism about its future influence.

Analysing the report, the Managing Director and Partner at BCG, Akram Awad, who can be the co-author of the report, stated: “AI is a key foundation of the intelligent city, and AI adoption and optimism are not confined to the ‘usual suspects’ technology hubs. Cities around the world are creating value for residents in different ways and from different starting points. We built the Intelligent Cities Index to provide an objective, holistic view of how cities shape and enable their AI ambitions and how effectively those ambitions translate into meaningful improvements in people’s lives.”

Partner and Director at BCG, Rami Mourtada, who can be a co-author of the report stated: “Given today’s rapid pace of change and evolving resident expectations, building a city’s intelligent foundation, paired with focused improvement across enablers requires urgency. But city leaders and business partners don’t need to try to do everything all at once. It’s a longer-term horizon and there is no single pathway forward. Intelligent city momentum comes from making intentional, and sometimes incremental, choices now and building for a smarter tomorrow with a clear, comprehensive roadmap.” 

To transfer from “Developing” to increased maturity tiers, the report emphasises that African metropolis leaders should tackle vital “soft enabler” bottlenecks; particularly enterprise capital entry, tech expertise retention, and institutional AI governance.

However, BCG’s evaluation confirmed that cities don’t want world-class infrastructure to make progress.

“By adopting a “focused specialist” method, African city centres can companion with native innovation ecosystems to deploy focused, incremental AI providers that tackle residents’ most rapid each day wants, changing grassroots enthusiasm into long-term financial development, “the report additional stated.