Smart city innovation in Vail: How AI aids government – News

Cities and towns around the world collect vast amounts of information to provide essential public services, so it’s only natural to explore how AI can break down silos and bring actionable insights to improve the lives of residents. 

This is the scenario currently underway in Vail, Colorado, through a collaboration between Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., SHI International Corp., Kamiwaza Corp., ProHawk Technology Group, Vaidio AI and Blackshark.ai GmbH to deliver smart city innovation for the mountain community. The initiative with Vail is part of a new HPE Agentic Smart City offering announced last week that will simplify the deployment and scaling of AI models in government agencies, regulated industries and large enterprises.

“The vision behind the agentic smart city solution that we’re announcing is looking at how we can start to bring together multiple types of AI, but with an agentic backbone so that we can start to break down the silos of information that live and exist across the cities and  municipalities,” said Robin Braun (pictured, top row, right), vice president of AI business development, hybrid cloud, at HPE. “The technology is not the important part though. What’s important is, in the end, what someone like the town of Vail can experience and what we can help them solve.”

Braun spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay for HPE’s “Unleash AI Momentum” interview series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Russell Forrest (top, left), town manager at the Town of Vail, Colorado; Jack Hogan (bottom, right), VP of advanced growth technologies at SHI International Corp.; and Luke Norris (bottom, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Kamiwaza Corp., and they discussed how a collaboration between the companies is helping Vail to leverage AI to support citizens and visitors. (* Disclosure below.)

Delivering real-time smart city data

With a population of approximately 4,500 people, Vail may seem like a small location in which to implement an ambitious set of digital services. Yet, the annual influx of visitors and ski enthusiasts can increase that number into the millions throughout peak season, which places more demand on town staff and highlights the need for efficiency.

“I like to say we’re a small, beautiful mountain town, but we have big city issues,” Forrest explained. “A lot of our really smart, talented people spend a lot of time looking at records. If we can have AI free them up so that they can spend more time doing higher level projects and higher-level thinking and provide more time for that personal touch for our customers and our guests and our residents, then that’s a success for the town of Vail.”

Achieving that success is a key objective for the partnership between HPE, SHI, Kamiwaza and other partners. AI is a central ingredient in developing new digital tools for the town’s government. Solutions include an AI-driven conversational assistant to deliver real-time information to residents and visitors, automated deed assistance and an expanded wildfire detection and prevention system that integrates multiple AI applications through SHI’s orchestration layer.

The wildfire use case showcases how multiple AI technologies combine to achieve life-safety outcomes. ProHawk enhances the video quality from existing town cameras, while Vaidio applies computer vision to analyze those live feeds for early signs of wildfires or other environmental risks. SHI’s integration brings these feeds together into a unified platform, allowing emergency teams to receive faster, higher-quality alerts. This unified approach replaces the traditional piecemeal process, where municipalities typically deploy separate systems that delay implementation.

“In the case of the town of Vail, that’s a town that scales up dramatically depending on the season and the type of events that are going on,” Hogan said. “It’s important that having the right platform, both an AI-ready infrastructure platform layer as well as an agentic AI backbone … to manage things with even less resources as you scale up in the application of how technology is taking the function of where key individuals have to spend their time.”

Leveraging AI for regulatory compliance and resident services

A significant amount of time spent by town officials involves handling compliance needs. To meet 508 compliance requirements from the federal government to ensure that all civic information is compliant with the American Disabilities Act for those with hearing or vision challenges, Kamiwaza’s ARIA agent and smart city agentic AI framework provides automatic scanning and access for key PDFs and images. This same agentic backbone can be leveraged for resident services, such as automated deed assistance.

“We have a multi-agent approach that literally allows us to look at things like a microfiche use case of handwritten documents from the ’70s and ’80s and actually turn that, as an agent is looking into it, into form data that then actions can be drawn from,” Norris said. “We’ve taken an approach of tens if not hundreds of different agents that are micro-focused on those particular jobs, allowing us to connect to literally any data format and file, all the way down to hand-scratched notes and actually make that move in and out of various systems.”

HPE’s work in the town of Vail underscores the value of partnerships to provide solutions that can have a real impact on city governments and residents. By combining ProHawk’s real-time video enhancement, Vaidio’s analytical modeling, Blackshark’s geospatial 3D mapping, SHI’s systems integration and Kamiwaza’s agentic orchestration, the project demonstrates how AI collaboration can improve safety, accessibility and citizen engagement.

“It was looking at and really listening to say, ‘Where are all of the areas that we can start to apply technology to help,’” Braun noted. “We now have a repeatable system solution that we can bring across to small towns like Vail — that have dynamism in them — to some of the largest cities in the U.S. For us, this is an important statement that you can go from idea to execution in a matter of a couple of months, and you can do that at any scale.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE’s “Unleash AI Momentum” interview series:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE’s “Unleash AI Momentum” interview series. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

Photo: News