- Complete Event Agenda Timeline
31 January 2027
Day 1
Breakfast and Registration
Welcome and Opening Remarks
The City of Tomorrow Is a Human Question
Opens the event by establishing its central proposition: urban intelligence is ultimately about human outcomes. The defining question of the intelligent city is not how much technology it can deploy, but what that intelligence enables people and communities to become. As AI reshapes economies, infrastructure and government, city leaders face choices that will determine how people work, move, connect and belong. What should progress look like when technology is advancing faster than the cities and institutions around it?
Lessons From Elsewhere: Final ten minutes of audience reflections to the discussion.
Keynote
The Keynote takes the audience beyond today's conversation about generative AI and introduce the emerging frontier of spatial intelligence: machines capable of understanding objects, places, movement and relationships in the physical world. Crucially, the Keynote connects this technological frontier to longstanding human-centred proposition: how do we build increasingly capable intelligence to augment human agency and creativity rather than diminish them?
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Shaping the Intelligent City: Direction Pace and Public Purpose
Explores how cities can keep pace with rapid technological change while building institutional capacity, partnerships and data governance, and ensuring accountability, human outcomes and public voice remain central.
Lessons From Elsewhere: Final ten minutes of audience reflections to the discussion.
Coffee Break [Meet Your Neighbours]
The New Geography: What Makes an Intelligent City?
AI may be globally accessible, but the economic value it creates will not be distributed evenly. Talent, capital, research, infrastructure and entrepreneurial networks continue to concentrate in particular places, creating powerful advantages for cities able to assemble the right conditions. This session asks what separates cities that become producers of the intelligence economy from those that simply consume its technologies — and what leaders can deliberately do to attract the people, companies, infrastructure and investment that allow an innovation ecosystem to take root and scale.
Lessons From Elsewhere: Final ten minutes of audience reflections to the discussion.
The Adaptive City: Infrastructure in an Intelligent Age
The intelligent city depends on a physical world that is increasingly interconnected with its digital one. AI is driving new demand for compute, energy, cooling, connectivity and data infrastructure at the same time that climate change is placing growing pressure on water, mobility and the built environment. This session explores how cities can design infrastructure that does more than meet today's needs: systems capable of sensing change, responding to it and evolving as technology, environmental conditions and patterns of urban life continue to shift.
Lessons From Elsewhere: Final ten minutes of audience reflections to the discussion.
Power, Trust and Accountability in the Intelligent City
Cities are moving from AI pilots towards systems capable of recommending, prioritising and increasingly acting. As those systems begin to influence public services, resources and decisions affecting everyday life, the challenge is no longer simply whether the technology works. Who sets its limits? Who can challenge its decisions? Where must human authority remain? And who is accountable when something goes wrong? This live session asks participants to solve a concrete intelligent-city governance challenge and identify the safeguards cities should establish before increasingly autonomous systems are deployed at scale.
Lessons From Elsewhere: Final ten minutes of audience reflections to the discussion.
Designed for Everyone: Who Benefits from the Intelligent City?
The intelligent city promises better services, greater access and a higher quality of life but those benefits will not automatically reach everyone. Technology, infrastructure and urban investment can narrow inequalities or reproduce them in new forms. Through practical city and technology blueprints, this session asks how inclusion can be designed into the systems, services and places shaping urban life and how cities can know whether the people who most need progress are actually benefiting from it.
Lessons From Elsewhere: Final ten minutes of audience reflections to the discussion.
Delegate Lunch
Immersive City Tours
From Masterplan to City: Building for an Everchanging Future
How do you masterplan a city when technology, patterns of work, mobility and the needs of residents will keep changing? This immersive journey takes participants inside Expo City's evolving urban fabric to explore how master planning, development, infrastructure and digital technology come together and how a city can be designed to adapt long after the original plan is drawn.
Inside the Green Innovation District: Building an Ecosystem for Scale
Go behind the scenes of Expo City's emerging Green Innovation District to explore how a city can deliberately create the conditions for sustainable innovation to grow. Through businesses, innovation platforms and the infrastructure around them, participants examine what it takes to move ideas from experimentation to demonstration, adoption and scale and how place itself can accelerate collaboration between companies, investors, researchers and government.
Designing for Belonging: How Places Become Communities
Buildings alone do not create cities. People do. This experience explores how physical design, culture, education, public space and shared experiences can turn urban infrastructure into places people identify with and return to. Moving through some of Expo City's most distinctive spaces, participants examine the small and large design choices that influence connection, memory, participation and belonging and ask what other cities can learn from them.
Coffee Break / Reconvene to Plenary
Fire-side Chat: Network Partner
Closing Plenary: When Everything Is Intelligent, What Matters?
After a day exploring how cities can become more intelligent, the closing plenary asks the question beneath all the others: what is that intelligence ultimately for? As machines become increasingly capable of predicting, creating, deciding and acting, cities will need to decide not only what to optimise, but what should remain deliberately human, social, imperfect or alive. What becomes more valuable when intelligence becomes abundant? And what should a city choose never to optimise away?
Lessons From Elsewhere: Final ten minutes of audience reflections to the discussion.
Closing Remarks
Transfers to Terra
Sundowners Reception
- 1 February 2027 · World Governments Summit
At the global stage
for governance
Human-centred city leadership
An invitation-only gathering of mayors, city leaders and industry executives from around the world explores how AI can strengthen public trust, redefine government excellence and improve quality of life.
High-level leadership dialogue
Invitation-only closed-door sessions drawing on Dubai’s oldest traditions of dialogue convene city leaders, policymakers, business executives and academics to develop joint commitments on the future of the intelligent city.
Platform for investment
The City Hall Stage connects urban projects with capital and strategic partners across the three days of the World Governments Summit.
City Hall Stage
The global stage for
urban projects, procurement pipelines and city solutions
Hosted by the World Majlis at the World Governments Summit, the City Hall Stage will spotlight investment and partnership opportunities to a global audience of city leaders, investors, development finance institutions and technology providers
