3rd Place at the “Livable Smart Cities” Innovation Challenge by Deutsche Telekom

With a proposal of building an AI city assistant, Envisioning Labs earned the third prize in this international innovation contest organized by HeroX and hosted by Bonn-based multinational Deutsche Telekom. It’s like Siri for the city of Bonn, we call ‘her’ BONN-ie :)

The contest presented the following challenge: “By 2050, 66% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas. How will cities supply these populations with basic resources like safe food, clean water, and sufficient energy, while also ensuring overall economic, social and environmental sustainability?”

Our winning idea centred around a smart city assistant personalizable for every citizen and visitor, using any language and accessible through mobile devices & public kiosks.

The solution is based on rapidly evolving technologies, typically provided by top technology companies for a global user base. We envision these technologies applied in a more contextual way at a specific city to citizen or visitor level. Instead of trying to service everything to everyone on the planet, as the top technology companies are working on, we envision constraining the AI to city specific information, updated in real-time from distributed Internet of Things sensors spread through the city, thereby offing much higher quality service to users than what you would get from the generic digital assistants we access from technology vendors today.

We were invited to present our winning proposal at the headquarters of Deutsche Telekom in Bonn, Germany during the company’s Innovation Day. At this event several mayors from German and other European cities evaluated multiple proposals from a wide range of corporate innovators and external consultants (like us!).

We thank HeroX and Deutsche Telekom for betting on innovation explorers and be open to the adoption of emerging technologies for the betterment of our cities.