Oxford Insights proposes a City AI Readiness Index — Abu Dhabi and Seoul named the first ‘Strategic Cities’
Countries have been ranked on AI readiness since 2017. Cities — the layer of government where AI most directly touches daily life — never got their own yardstick. That changed today: Oxford Insights, the research firm behind the national Government AI Readiness Index, published a proposed City AI Readiness Index, built on a six-city study with Abu Dhabi as the deep-dive case.
The report, titled City AI Readiness: A Deep Dive into Abu Dhabi and the Global Landscape and produced with the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Khalifa University, starts from a blunt finding: cities are already wiring AI into public services, but no shared framework exists to compare how prepared they are to do it safely, effectively, or accountably. (Oxford Insights’ announcement)
Four city archetypes
Researchers built a six-pillar framework and sorted cities into four archetypes: infrastructure-led “Platform Cities”, research-driven “Cognitive Cities”, service-focused “Delivery Cities”, and “Strategic Cities”, where AI sits at the center of government and economic planning. Abu Dhabi and Seoul landed in that top tier. The study covered six cities in all: Abu Dhabi, Seoul, London, Montreal, Helsinki, and Tallinn.
For Canadians, one detail stands out: Montreal made the six-city study set — the only North American city in the lineup. The report’s archetypes are meant as diagnostic tools: a city can see whether its strengths and gaps match its chosen route, and what to prioritize next.
Why Abu Dhabi anchors the index
The UAE capital launched a three-year strategy in January 2025 to become what the report describes as the world’s first AI-native government. Its TAMM platform — an agentic, AI-powered public-services system — now serves 4.7 million users and resolves 96 percent of enquiries autonomously, according to the announcement. “Cities are where most people deal with government, yet there has been no shared way to judge how ready they are for AI,” said Oxford Insights CEO Richard Stirling, calling Abu Dhabi the right test case because it has assembled “every layer of the AI stack, from compute and energy through models and capital to government as a large-scale user.”
What happens next
The index is a proposal, not yet a ranked table — the report lays the foundation, and Oxford Insights plans to pilot the framework across 15 to 20 cities. It also found no single path to readiness: the six cities share the same core priorities, from governance and funding to talent and infrastructure, but take different routes shaped by structural conditions and deliberate choices. Areas flagged as needing continued attention as deployment scales include compute and energy, talent, governance, and resilience.
Why it matters — and the caveats
This is the first serious attempt to do for municipalities what the Government AI Readiness Index did for nations in 2017: give city leaders a comparable reference point, and residents a clearer picture of how prepared their city is. The timing fits — as national strategies plateau, the action is moving to city halls. (coverage, full report)
The caveats: the framework is brand new and untested beyond six cities; its rankings will only mean something once the 15-to-20-city pilot lands. And the headline TAMM figures — 4.7 million users, 96 percent autonomy — come from the announcement itself, not an independent audit. City readiness data, like national data before it, starts as self-reporting.