From Asphalt to Algorithms
How Interoperability Powers an Agentic City
Introduction
Gone are the days when a city ran on the well-designed plans of a single agency professional. Today, it runs on complex, cross-sector and cross-agency systems powered by vendors, sensors, platforms, data and a fast-growing layer of artificial intelligence (AI) spread across transportation, public safety, permitting, housing, sanitation, and resident 311 requests.
AI gives officials extraordinary power to draw insights from vast, disparate data — but that power depends on well-designed systems. Without shared standards that ease cross-agency use, keep the city in control of its data, and prevent lock-in to proprietary products, AI’s insights stay stranded in the agency that generated them.
Interoperability is the connective tissue that lets those insights travel across boundaries — the system thinking a city needs to turn AI’s insight into genuinely responsive government.
Interoperability requires technical, semantic, governance, and legal components that together enable a city to operate through interconnected systems rather than by disconnected silos. In a smart-city or Agentic City context, this means treating the city as a “system of systems” (transport, energy, safety, environment, social services) that must work together. With this alignment, a city can reliably exchange, interpret, and act on information across sections, levels of government, and vendors so that, from the resident’s point of view, services feel coordinated and coherent.
Comprehensively defined, interoperability amounts to a leadership philosophy for how a city organizes its data, procurement, and vendor relationships so that AI tools and other applications can plug into a common foundation the city controls. When done correctly, this foundation will make it easier for residents to understand and participate, improve local conditions, and enable responsive government with more input, fewer handoffs and errors, and less duplicated effort. For innovation, interoperability lowers the cost and risk of trying something new. A city can pilot an AI tool, switch a vendor, or add a capability without rebuilding its foundation each time.
Will Weatherford, a former Florida House of Representatives speaker, explained it well in his comments to Government Technology: real gains arrive only as “AI tools become embedded across systems and workflows rather than added on top of them.” Embedding requires interoperability.
Two decades ago, in Governing by Network, Bill Eggers and I argued that a web of public, private, and nonprofit partners can either knit fragmented services into one joined-up system or, without a deliberate integrator, inadvertently deepen the fragmentation it was meant to cure. Integration that enables systems approaches requires shared standards and city-controlled interoperability protocols that make many vendors, software products, and agencies behave like one system, not fifteen disconnected ones. An interoperable approach lets each tool’s output become input for the next agency.
About the Author
Stephen Goldsmith
Stephen Goldsmith is the Derek Bok Professor of the Practice of Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of Data-Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. He previously served as the mayor of Indianapolis and deputy major of New York City.