If an opera were created to capture this moment in history, it might open with a scene of heightening drama. A world growing more fragmented, more divided. Confrontation overshadowing cooperation. But as the story unfolds, another plot will emerge closer to people and more consequential to their daily lives. Because in cities, a different kind of leadership is taking hold. Cities are reaching out across oceans and across borders to make connections. They're building bridges and finding shared purpose. Cities have everything to gain from working together and from exchanging ideas because they know their similarities are greater than their differences. And that the best urban innovations have no boundaries. Cities are forming a community of their own. It's growing in size and strength. The more cities join, the stronger the connections and the brighter the future will be. So, welcome to Madrid and to Bloomberg City Lab. Let's connect.
Wow. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and absolutely let's connect. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wiesenthal. And we are the co-hosts of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast. We are also very excited to be your MCs for this morning. Now, on our show, we talk about a lot of different things, including some of the big challenges and opportunities facing cities around the world.
That's right. We talk about housing, affordability, technology, and climate. And with all of our episodes, we try to understand not just what's happening, but of course also why. And so this morning, we're going to help guide you through some of our main themes, our three main themes, beginning with the importance of urban connections and how to strengthen them in your city. We'll also examine how one of the most consequential forces of our day, artificial intelligence, is transforming lives and how city leaders can make AI work for their own communities. And finally, we'll look at why local leadership matters, how leaders everywhere are finding innovative ways to solve the tough problems. And to get everything started, please join us in welcoming the visionary behind Bloomberg City Lab, the founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and of course the three-term mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg.
Well, thank you, Joe and Tracy, and hello, everyone. Buenos dias and bienvenidos a City Lab, and thanks for coming. It is great to be here in Madrid, and I think it's a wonderful way to kick things off with the incredibly talented Anthony Roth Costanzo. I offered to join him in a duet, but he said it would be better if I saved my voice. You can thank him later. I know many of you've traveled far to be here, and if you're jet-lagged, feel free to have a second cup of coffee. If you stayed out late last night, that is understandable. Dinner in Spain often ends around the same time that I start breakfast. We are joined today by mayors and local leaders from nearly 100 cities, and that includes Mayor Almeida of Madrid. Nice round of applause for him. You're going to hear from him in a minute. Our team at Bloomberg Philanthropies has been glad to partner with him, and I want to thank him for hosting us this week. And a big thanks to our partners at the Aspen Institute as well. Now, we are living in a period of extraordinary transformation. Wars are making global politics, artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we live and the way we work. Climate change is posing dangerous new threats. Isolationism is harming the ability of national governments to combine strengths and collaborate. And the more national governments retreat from the world stage, the more important mayors become. Our whole team at Bloomberg Philanthropies is committed to helping mayors rise to the occasion. Mayors have to move quickly and adapt to big change, and we are too. For instance, for years we've been helping cities harness the power of data through programs like What Works Cities and the City Data Alliance. They're helping mayors turn information into better decisions and better results for residents. And now we are building on that foundation, with a major focus on AI. It's helping mayors and their teams use AI in powerful ways that can make a real difference in people's lives. We're also expanding our investment in global leadership programs, including our work with Harvard. A few months ago, we launched a major expansion of the program here in Europe in partnership with the London School of Economics and the Hertie School. Many of the participating mayors are here today, including the mayor of Madrid, who you're going to hear from in a few minutes. The program now includes a focus on helping mayors achieve quick policy changes that people can immediately feel in their daily lives. And that helps mayors build trust so that they can take on the bigger, harder challenges. We've also expanded our efforts to help mayors experiment more. Our Mayors Challenge competition is empowering mayors to develop bold, practical solutions to tough problems. It gives them a forum to strengthen their proposals with input from peers and experts. And this year, we had more applicants than ever, and we selected more winners than ever, 24 of them. The range of cities is impressive, and so is the creativity of their ideas. This morning, we're joined by mayors of some of the winning cities, and I would like them all to stand right now, and let's give them a round of applause. Now, mayors understand that they have everything to gain from cooperation. One city's success can spread to other cities and improve lives there, too. Fostering more of that collaboration and cooperation is at the heart of our work at Bloomberg Philanthropies. We have partnerships with more than 700 cities around the world, and some of the success stories that the mayors are writing are highlighted in our new annual report. We just released it. All of you should have received a copy, and I hope you'll take some time to read through it. Maybe you'll find other ways that we can work together or see ideas from another city that you can bring to your cities. Across all our programs, we're working to accelerate the spread of innovative ideas from city to city. One way to do that is by building global networks focused on specific issues facing cities everywhere, and that includes a growing toll of injuries and non-communicable diseases like cancer and diabetes and heart disease. Globally, they account for more than three-quarters of all premature deaths. Through the Partnership for Healthy Cities, mayors are joining forces to tackle them. Fortunately, they're passing small policies to clean the air and to expand access to healthy foods. They've been working to give people more alternatives to cars by expanding bike infrastructure and mass transit. Road safety, as you know, has been a big focus for Bloomberg Philanthropies for almost 20 years, and over that time, we've invested more than $500 million in our road safety program. And working with partners, we've helped to pass nearly 200 policies to make our roads safer. They've saved around 1 million lives by best estimates. There's much more we can do, however. Road crashes still sadly claim more than 1 million lives every single year. So today, Bloomberg Philanthropies is committing another $350 million to build on that progress. And our goal is the saving of another million lives by 2030. Now, we have a busy agenda for you, and I hope you get a lot out of it. But what matters most is what happens when you go back home. So make sure that you talk with lots of different people here who can be a resource to you after this summit is over. There is no limit to what we can achieve if we work together. And to get started on the day, it is my pleasure to turn it over to our host. He has been the mayor of Madrid since 2019, and he has led ambitious initiatives that are improving lives here in many ways, from fighting climate change and air pollution to digitizing city services to ensuring access to affordable housing, which is a pressing challenge for so many cities. He's also a committed partner and collaborator with fellow mayors around the world and with our team at Bloomberg Philanthropies. So let me thank him for his leadership and partnership. Please welcome Mayor Almeida.
Welcome to this city of Madrid who is hosting us. All of us who live in this city we have arrived at the city at some point and we end up becoming Madrilenos natives of the city. This is one of the unique characteristics of the city. I know I would like to start talking about this sweet spot we're all talking about in Madrid. Sometimes looks like one of the big capitals of the world. Where you hear many accents, many languages, the people starting many projects for their lives. And my first question is related to how can the city and the mayor and your team, how can you manage this success? How can we manage this interest in the city? And living in the city without losing what makes us special which is our identity, our tradition, our culture life of each of our districts, culture together with a tradition that makes it special.
Thank you very much Maria. First allow me to express my gratitude to Bloomberg Philanthropies and City Lab particularly to Mike and his team for the work that he has been doing and continues to do supporting mayors. In Madrid we have a relevant role not only at the national but also at the international level. So to have an organization that allows us to learn and helps us to have tools to take increasingly better decisions and face the big challenges we have. It's also extraordinary of course by honoring our city with this event. So together with all of us who are sitting here in this theater it is true that Madrid is in a sweet spot in a point of growth that we maybe never had before but this doesn't mean that we should ignore our traditions, where we come from. There's a word that defines the future of the city and that allows us to guarantee this growth process which is balance. Balance and the ability we have to attract talent and retain talent and grow as a city. But at the same time know that if we lose our identity then we will lose our soul. So we won't be able to consolidate this exceptional success that we're having. So we have to seek this balance between growth and identity. That can generate prosperity and employment and to continue building a city that is not built from the top down but from the bottom up from each district of the city. And that is what we now focus. Now the main challenges for balance and one the first is safety that is a point of attraction Madrid. Can you guarantee this safety sense of safety? Yes, we must ensure this security, this safety in the city. Many guests have mentioned how at ease and safe they felt walking the streets and parks. And the decisions that make a person choose a city to live not only financial maybe a few decades earlier people were looking for a job. Now what people look is a good city to live in. And to make a good city you must have good safety. Madrid has the biggest police force in Europe for a city of our size. And the safety is not only objective but also subjective. There must be also that feeling of feeling safe in this city. And we will continue to work on this because we are aware that the world in which we're living right now that is a competitive advantage for this city. But this is part of what we call quality of life which is good public services good options for leisure and good cultural options. So that's what when you leave home and you come out of your house you should be happy to live in Madrid and that will mean that it's success for us. So the challenge is not only for Madrid but one of the challenges is housing. There are many projects people who are waiting for a house. So now we have the plan Vive. Is there a lessons learned from that program? Because people don't need long-term responses because they need responses now. So in Madrid we have big business schools and universities. We attract students from all over the world. And they generally say in the surveys that they want to stay to live in Madrid because they end up feel it's a good city to live in. But the main problem they find is housing. And this happened with students and with everybody who is in Madrid is particularly in affordable dwelling. So we are working to make a solution. We don't have a miracle solution. We can't say that this will be fixed overnight. We have a model and a plan that we believe will function. That involves generating new housing. Also within the city. We have established regulations that were new for any city in Spain. We have made all the procedures to obtain a housing faster. We have grown in 2 million people 2 million inhabitants in the past few years. We haven't built sufficient housing to house all of these people. And therefore we must start to build as soon as possible in the city on a massive scale. And we've generated all the regulations, the financial and regulatory situations and conditions to do this. I can assume the commitments that there is no other city with so much capacity to build new housing. There's another challenge which is the aging of our population in this city we can find a problem here people who are living on their own. They are at a latter age in their lives. How are you working with this? Firstly we are the city with the longest life expectancy in the world together with Tokyo that says that we have the ability to take care of the elderly. And Spain present day Spain have been built by them. We also have a high percentage of population over 65. The most important contract is a contract of remote assistance for the elderly that allows us to identify any circumstance that could present a threat for elderly people. And so elderly people can communicate through the telephone, through mobile, through a smart watch. So in the area of unwanted loneliness we have an extraordinarily solidarity initiative in our city that enables young people to assist and to accompany the elderly either personally or through a phone call. And a network of workers of municipal workers who facilitate this. So when you have given your entire life to a country the institutions must not abandon them. And we have to provide solutions for them and AI through this remote assistance contract allows us to prevent and respond faster to any issue they may have. We are living in a very fast changing pace of changes in Madrid. You know how we are looking to elections in the near future. Would you like to be remembered as the mayor who improved the structures and communications in Madrid? When you are subject to politics mayors are usually asked about a legacy. And it's always identified with infrastructures. It is true that we are carrying out infrastructures. More than ever that will improve modernization and better quality of life in different districts. In different areas, but we should not aspire only to material legacy, but also in services. When they ask me about what is my legacy and I always say the same. As a person who each point in time did the right thing for the common welfare and to serve citizens. I think this is what dignifies politics and what allowed us put forth our best efforts. We have for different people, our legacy will be different depending on where people live and the improvements we have made in the district or help the elderly. But the legacy of a person in policy and politics he did what they had to do at the right time with the general interest in mind. Okay, this is we have fulfilled our objective of having this chat in the time slot, so thank you very much and welcome. And I'm sure we have time to enjoy a wonderful city such as Madrid.
All right, thank you and we are back and we are about to dive into a technology that of course affects all of us every day and that is of course AI.
That's right. So AI is growing so powerful that city leaders today are facing a critical challenge, which is how to prepare their cities for what actually comes next. Maybe one day city budgets will include token budget. Probably sooner than we all think. But anyway, we're about to hear from some of the world's top city leaders and industry innovators on how they are approaching this enormous challenge. And we're going to invite you to participate in a very large town hall.
Yeah, okay, large is a clue here. Think large as in language model of course. All right, we will see you in a moment.
5,000 km away from where we are today is the city where I was born. Tehran. That's the capital city of Iran. Iran, not for the reasons that it's in the news right now, is key to why I'm standing in front of you today. I left with my family when I was 3 years old. I went back when I was 19 and one thing struck me more than anything else. Silence. Not the absence of opinions. Actually, Iran's full of people that have things they desperately want to say. But just the utter lack of faith that anyone in government wants to hear from them. That the voice of people matters. And now I'm in front of you, leaders of your cities, and I imagine that you feel differently that the voice of people matters to you. But I do want to check that. So I'm going to ask you to show me by raising your hands if it's important to you to hear from the people in the communities that you serve. Okay, that's beautiful. Keep your hands up. I love that you guys are raising your hands up there. Thank you. I see you and appreciate you. Keep your hand up if you are confident that you are indeed hearing from everyone in your community today and not just the loudest people. Yeah, okay. Okay. So that we just demonstrated is the listening gap. The fact that it's much harder to actually hear from people than our desire to hear from them. And this listening gap matters the most for cities. So Jigsaw, we built a tool to address the listening gap for websites. So Perspective is the most popular free tool to moderate comment spaces online, used more than a billion times a day. But last year we shifted our focus from addressing the listening gap in websites to addressing it in cities. And sense making is what we're going to talk about. It is a way to reimagine the town hall. The first place where we took sense making is a town that many of you may not have heard of. This is Bowling Green, Kentucky. A mid-size American town of about 80,000 people facing challenges. So Bowling Green is doubling in size over the next two decades. That's growth, jobs. But you know, farmers are concerned that the land is going to be used for construction. Residents, some of them are concerned about migration. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the migration that they're worried about is not from foreigners, but from people from the neighboring state moving and diluting their culture. There are a lot of concerns. And I want to introduce you to this man, Doug Gorman. He is the judge executive of the county, which is basically like the mayor. And he asked the people of Bowling Green a question. He said, 'Do we want this change to happen to us or do we want it to happen for us?' If we want it to happen for us, we have to come together around a shared vision for Bowling Green, which is really inspiring. Until you think about the barriers to coming together. So in a town of 80,000 people, how many people do you think typically show up for a town hall? I'm going to count here. Eight. Eight. That is just you guys sitting in front of me in the front row. Just you guys, not even you guys. Eight people show up. So we wondered like why is it that people don't participate? Well, we asked them. This is a young college student in Bowling Green. We wanted to take him to a meeting of the city planning commission. He said, 'I can't go to that. I'm not a lawyer.' Like he thought he wasn't qualified to participate. We took him by the way, he talked, there were no lawyers. There were two sisters that we spoke to who had just resettled from Afghanistan to Bowling Green. The idea of participating in a public forum was completely unimaginable to them. And it kind of makes sense, right? If you don't think your voice matters, you're not going to use it. But we thought like what if we could build it like an invitation that would make people feel truly invited. So last year we supported Doug and his team to host a large virtual town hall open to all residents to ask them all the same question, which is what do you want from Bowling Green in the next 25 years? And we translated this invitation into nine languages. We went to sports games and places of worship and supermarkets. We really wanted to get people to participate. How many people do you think showed up to the month-long town hall? Okay, so the baseline is eight. The options are eight, 80, or 800. So show of hands if you think eight people came to our virtual town hall. Thank you. No, you guys are trolling me. 80. 80 people? Cuz that would be impressive. Or 800 people. 8,000 people. We went from eight to 8,000 people participating in this town hall. They shared 4,000 proposals of what they want to see and they weighed in a million times. If you put the proposals back-to-back on sticky notes and you laid them out in a straight line, they would span the entire length of the Bernabeu stadium twice. Hala Madrid, am I right? Okay, so Doug Gorman made this promise to his people. He said, 'If you use your voice, I will listen.' Which is literally not a promise that you can make and keep without AI. What is it that people talked about? A lot of the stuff that you might imagine. The economy, infrastructure, housing. Were there any fringe opinions? Yeah, sure. In the food and agriculture area, there was a resident who proposed a law to make all restaurants include free ketchup packets in takeout meals. Okay? Like this person felt very strongly about this. And what is beautiful is that they felt welcome to share this idea in this town hall. They got zero supporting votes, but the thing that's not so much of a joke is that that is democracy in practice, that that person showed up. And indeed the people in Bowling Green did feel that participating in confidence in democracy gave them more confidence that their voice matters and more hope about their future. As a community scales, the needs of the people to be heard don't change. And we know this cuz we tried doing sense making at the level of the nation. So in We the People, we got a representative group from a very large polarized society, which is America. And we invited them to have a conversation about what it means to be American today. Once again, they shared 1.6 million words. That's four times as many words as are written in Don Quixote. So, it's a lot. And once again, they came away feeling that their voice mattered and more hopeful about the future. You know who else's voice matters? Yours. All right. So, we are going to try something that we actually haven't tried before, which is to have a real-time sense-making dialogue. We are a community, City Lab in Madrid, on April 28th, 2026. This group of people has never been together before. If this were a traditional conference, you would leave tomorrow evening having spoken to a maximum of 5% of the people here. Our goal with this experiment is for you to leave feeling that you've heard from 100% of the people. I'm going to invite my colleague Angelo Corvino to come and help us run this experiment. But as he comes on, I just want you to show me again with your hands. I'm looking for all of you if you're going to participate in this experiment and see if we can have a conversation amongst us and okay. You guys are awesome. All right. Welcome, Angelo.
All right. Everyone, it's a pleasure to be here today with all of you. For the next 7 minutes, I'd like you to talk, not to each other, but to our AI actually. So, please take out your phones and open the camera app. So, go ahead and do that. Some people already do have their phones out. Yeah. All right. So, normally sense-making is used for policy-related questions. But today, keeping with the theme, we wanted to ask you about your city. You're going to receive two questions as you open the link and you'll receive personally generated follow-up questions to each of those two questions. So, we're going to ask you to answer four questions in total. And I'd really like you to participate generously. That means take the time to type out your thoughts and words and the reasoning behind them and you can share in whatever language of your choice. The results of this experiment are going to be used to generate findings like what you just saw in the Bowling Green example and we're going to share those findings back with you later today on stage. As with all of our work, your answers will be completely anonymous. We're only collecting the words you enter, not any data about you and then we're also going to delete those words right after we present the report back to you. So, with that, I'd like you to get started. Please scan the QR code and begin and we're going to queue a timer and some music for you as well and we'll give you some cues along the way. But please do participate. Thank you. It's going to be a lot of fun and I think I'll do it alongside them so I can help keep time. And take your time. Remember, take your time. You have still 6 minutes. All right. The music change means that you should be on to your second question, if not, your third question. So, maybe start picking up. All right. All right. Music change means you should almost be done. I'm going to take a photo of you. My live dashboard says that a lot of you have completed already. So, cool. That's great. Awesome. Have we moved on to checking emails now? I think most of us are done, so I'm going to cut us a minute short if that's okay and really thank you so much for taking part. I'm so excited to be able to share the results back with you soon and we're going to hand it to our AI during this time to make sense of all of it and we'll be back in a little bit. Thank you so much.
Please welcome back to stage Mike Bloomberg.
Well, hello again. I hope you're enjoying the morning so far. There are a lot of complex issues that we'd like to cover today and one of the biggest is artificial intelligence. AI holds so much promise to help municipalities improve the quality of services and access to them and we thought it would be a good opportunity to let you see what's going on elsewhere. AI also presents many challenges that will be felt at the city level, including changes to the challenges and changes to the job market. I think it's fair to say nobody knows what the future holds, but the better prepared cities are the better they can seize opportunities or avoid dangers. To help them, Bloomberg Philanthropies is launching a new initiative today. It is called the Mayors AI Forum. And there are 10 founding cities. They are Bogota, Boston, Buenos Aires, Kyiv, London, Madrid, Nairobi, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Tokyo. These cities are all centers of innovation and commerce. They're all regional economic hubs, and they are well positioned to generate new ideas and help them spread. They all have creative mayors who are
Committed to seizing the opportunities that AI represents. And the mayors also share a commitment to working proactively and with each other to adjust climate changes, potential challenges. We're glad to be joined by some of them today. The initiatives that we're about to start will help mayors collaborate and amplify their voices. It will help ensure that private sector companies understand the issues facing cities as they develop AI products. And it'll help governments at all levels understand those issues as they develop AI policies. The Mayors AI Forum will be supported by the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University. It will benefit from experts and world-class advisers from across the Bloomberg Philanthropies network. And I'm glad to say that one of the people helping to launch this initiative is the mayor of London, my friend Sadiq Khan. And I'll tell you he has been one of the great mayors in the world today. He's done an outstanding job leading the city, and he's one of the boldest and most innovative and imaginative mayors in the world. Bloomberg Philanthropies has been glad to work with him on so many issues from fighting climate change and air pollution to supporting the arts and spurring economic growth. London, as we all know, was one of the most important centers for tech with a flourishing startup scene including AI. There is an enormous amount of talent and expertise that the mayor and his team can tap into. We're glad to have him with us today. Sadiq, the floor is all yours.
Well, honor everyone. It's brilliant to join you today. With apologies to our dear friends in Madrid, in a room full of more than a hundred mayors, I'm sure we'll all agree it's great to be here in the second greatest city in the world. There may be less agreement on which is the greatest city in the world, but I'm glad that Mike Bloomberg, the three-times mayor of the third greatest city in the world, introduced me. But seriously, can I pay tribute to Mike for his leadership and to Bloomberg Philanthropies for investing in mayors and our capacity to lead and for bringing mayors together to address the most pressing issues of our time from adapting to advances in AI to combating the climate crisis. Please show our appreciation to Mike Bloomberg and his team.
It's fantastic to be in Madrid, a city with two of the biggest football teams in the world. After Liverpool, of course. The home of my football team. Like football rivalries, the debate around AI can sometimes be polarizing. On the one hand, you have the AI evangelists who passionately promote the exciting new technology often without giving sufficient thought to the risks. On the other, you have the AI alarmists who insist it will inevitably lead to humanity's demise. But the truth is neither uncritical optimism nor fear-driven pessimism will serve us well. It's why I'm approaching and advocating for AI realism. This means being clear-eyed about the potential perils of AI while also being enthusiastic about the amazing possibilities. In London we're already using AI to predict congestion, tackle poor housing conditions, speed up cancer diagnosis, aid in the fight against the climate crisis and much, much more. If AI is developed in a responsible fashion guided by sound ethical frameworks and shaped by the progressive values of our cities, then undoubtedly we can harness this technology for incalculable good. And that's why this new Mayors AI Forum announced by Mike Bloomberg this morning is so important. This network will ensure we're shaping how AI is developed and deployed rather than allowing it to shape us. We know our cities are uniquely equipped to perform the role. Unlike nation-states that too often dither, we are the doers. The ones willing to confront the critical issues of our day and transform challenges into opportunities. And London is ready to play our part. It's why today we're also launching a new London AI and jobs task force which will monitor the impact AI is having on jobs, map out the future of work in our city and ensure we're seizing the incredible opportunities. We're also offering all Londoners free AI training to help them upskill and make the most of this new technology. We're doing this because I want London and all our cities to lead the world in responsible AI development. We don't want to move fast and break things. We want to move fast and make things without leaving anyone behind. So let me just end by saying this. Managing a technology with such awesome power will require all of us working together. But if you get this right the rewards are infinite. Collectively, our cities can rise to this moment, make the age of AI a success and deliver a better and brighter future for all. Thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone. What a beautiful setting to be in. And I can't miss AI Forum you've all announced. You know, at this time as a journalist, every national government you hear from wants to say that they're doing AI. Every business also wants to say they're doing AI. As a proud London resident, it's exciting to hear about this forum. And I want to hear, you know, what can you do via this forum that you can't do alone?
Yeah, well thanks a lot. If you just think about it, when it comes to AI, the standards are developed by the corporations, by the companies. The regulation by national governments, and the framework by international forums. What's the role of mayors and cities? And that's what the Mayors Forum is designed to do, to get the founding cities to start off with, but the rest of the mayors here as well to work together to scope out our respective cities, to work with the developers and the companies, but to use AI to our advantage. If you think about the big two disruptive things of the last 200 years, Industrial Revolution and globalization, the jobs affected were actually manual jobs. The AI revolution will affect white-collar jobs and the knowledge-based economy, professional services, legal, accountancy, public administration. So we as mayors have, I think, a responsibility to step up, and that's why I'm really pleased Mike is supporting us with this Mayors Forum.
Mayor Jones, San Antonio is also a founding city in this forum. I know you do a lot of work with tech and innovation. You know, we've been hearing about digital government more and more since the pandemic. AI should definitely speed things up. Can you give us some examples of tangible things you're doing? How you're using the technology for public service delivery already?
Sure. So one of the things I had the staff do at the end of last year is conduct a tabletop. As for those in the US, we're all grappling with some pretty significant financial cuts. And so while we might not have all the answers, the best we can do is try to reduce uncertainty. So we had a tabletop to figure out, 'Hey, if we lost half of our funding for public health or half of our funding for affordable housing, what would that mean in our community?' So we brought together the stakeholders and really had a good conversation about the risks that we see, the assumptions that we might be making about who could cover down in if any of these cuts actually came to fruition. But more importantly, as we think about that risk, how then can we mitigate it? So we did the tabletop, we've identified the risks, now we'll use our AI, some of the AI tools and some of the collaborators as well to help us understand as we get closer to seeing those risks come to fruition, how do we then budget for those in the near term and in the long term? But it really does help us ensure that we are seeing these risks to the greatest fidelity as possible. We're also utilizing it in term, it's maybe a term generated by AI, but our non-revenue water, it leaks. We own our water utility. And so we right now are looking at major investment in our infrastructure. And so we're utilizing some AI tools to help us be more proactive to understand where leaks may occur, to understand what that bond, that major infrastructure investment may need to be in the near term as well as in the long term.
And Matty, you know, a lot of us in this room we have used AI chatbots, we might have even used image generators. But you know, Eleven Labs you work with voice. I think that's one of those technologies lots of us won't necessarily have interacted with yet. And your experience has been in Ukraine, which is such a fascinating setting for this. Tell us about public service delivery. Why would a voice agent be helpful in that context?
Exactly. As models, as intelligence becomes more available, as becomes smarter, we actually believe that bottleneck, the constraining factor will be voice and how you actually bring that intelligence, how you communicate with a lot of those models. So as a company we've created the research and the product to create the voice models and then build a platform that allows businesses, governments to communicate in new ways with the citizens, with their audience. We probably started in London. We have our headquarters there and I'm originally Polish. We are heavily investing in the European ecosystem. Coincidentally, we're opening Eleven up in Spain this week as well with lodging our presence in the region. But of the inspiration for the work as we think about the work of the government came from our deployment in Ukraine. Where the government reached to us and wanted to create the first AI agent government. And what this meant in practice was actually they have a central app for all the citizens called Diia, where you can access the governmental services from the benefits programs to your ID documents to some of the requests for help. And they wanted to add a voice layer so you can communicate with Diia through voice. And what is incredible is of course as you have everything that's happening across Ukraine, despite that they really are looking to lead with that innovation to provide that access to people that might not be able to access those services in turn. Each ministry will have engineers embedded in that ministry, whether that's Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Public Affairs. And each of those ministries started automating all that work. So now people can call in to Diia as of yesterday, Ministry of Economy launched the voice agent, ask about help with work, with benefits, and have that ability in a completely new way.
Wow. Well, look, we spend a lot of time talking about the positive, the opportunity with AI. But you know, Sadiq Khan, this January you sort of issued this warning that AI could usher in a new era of mass unemployment. There's a lot of talk also about disinformation. What's the work that needs to be done to make sure that AI is rolled out safely?
Well, I think if we're not careful big tech can go the way of big tobacco in terms of the mistakes made by big tobacco, knowing the perils of big tobacco. Nicotine is addictive, tobacco is damaging to health. They knew this and kept it secret and didn't share that with anybody. I think we know now from not just the court cases in America but we know the dangers of infinite scrolling. We know the dangers in relation to online abuse, disinformation, the impacts on democracy. Women can be undressed using AI and sexualized very easily. Young children have real challenges with this. But there's an opportunity in terms of potential of AI with the right guardrails and the right safeguards in place. I think the potential is huge. Matty and Gina talked about how we can improve public services particularly with finite resources. But also we could improve productivity. My view is I think there'll be very few jobs replaced by AI. But there'll be jobs where people don't use AI they'll be replaced by jobs where people are using AI. How you can augment your job, increase productivity, improve public services. But big tech needs to work with us. And that's what this forum is all about. Look, we are close to our people, close to businesses. Big tech work with us with this new phenomenon of AI to make sure it's fit for purpose, it's within the guardrails, it's fit for public safety rather than monetizing this, profiting from poison and division. This ain't called the outrage economy, I call it. There's a division dividend. We don't want AI to go the way of big tech has in the last 10 years. And I'm really pleased people like Matty and others are working with us and will work with the Mayors Forum to get this right.
You know, when we talk about getting this right, there's lots of levels of coordination. I mean, in the EU we have the AI Act. You guys have the sort of mayor level forum. Mayor Jones, you know, in the US of course you have the federal system. For you, what is the correct level at which to coordinate? What is the role of each of these levels that can be helpful for you as a mayor?
Well, I think part of that goes back to actually the previous question in terms of what are you actually trying to achieve, right? And we are really grappling not only with how quickly AI is being employed and changing the circumstances, but also with how quickly people are being left behind. Certainly that is related to some of the economic policies we are now implementing in the United States, unfortunately. And one of the things that we're really grappling with are not only the impacts of the one big beautiful bill, which will see massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP. At the same time we are seeing the ways in which folks are not necessarily ready for this economy. So we're dealing with the most vulnerable at the same time. So when we're thinking about upskilling, it's as I was thinking about this panel, it's really about seizing the opportunity as well as grappling with reality. And I want to just touch on what you just described there in terms of what you all are doing. But in San Antonio, we've got an opportunity to really be much smarter about how we invest in upskilling folks and what that looks like. Not everybody's going to be a cyber tech person and that's okay because we still need plumbers and electricians and all the other folks. So part of making our community AI ready is also ensuring that we're managing people's expectations about what this economy can do and will mean for them and then preparing them accordingly. AI really kind of forces you to gut-check yourself. We just don't have the luxury of time or resources to do things the way that we have done or things that make us feel good. We've got to just say, 'No, no, no, actually we're going to of the $140 million that we've got left in our upskilling program, we're actually going to focus on the trades to make sure that in this economy you have a good living wage that allows you to thrive.'
