Artificial intelligence affordances for urban mobility

Purpose Artificial intelligence (AI) has been touted as one of the viable solutions to address urban mobility issues. Despite a growing body of research on AI across various sectors, its use in the mobility sector remains underexplored. This study addresses this limitation by investigating AI applications and identifying the AI material properties and use cases that offer mobility-specific affordances. Design/methodology/approach Although AI applications in mobility are growing, academic research on the subject has yet to catch up. Therefore, we follow a systematic review and analysis of practitioner literature. We conducted a comprehensive search for relevant documents through Advanced Google and OECD databases and identified 173 sources. We selected 40 sources published between 2015 and 2022 and analysed the corpus of evidence through abductive qualitative analysis technique. Findings The analysis reveals that mobility organisations are implementing various AI technologies and systems such as cameras, sensors, IoT, computer vision, natural language processing, robotic process automation, machine learning, deep learning and neural networks. These technologies offer material properties for sensing mobility objects and events, comprehending mobility data, automating mobility activities and learning from mobility data. By exploiting these material properties, mobility organisations are integrating urban mobility management, personalising and automating urban mobility, enabling the smartification of infrastructure and asset management, developing better urban transport planning and management, and enabling automatic driving. Originality/value The study contributes a mid-range theory of the affordances of AI for mobility (AI4M) at the infrastructure, operation and service levels. This contribution extends the existing understanding of AI and offers an interconnected perspective of AI affordances for further research. For practitioners, the study provides insights on how to explore AI in alignment with organisational goals to collectively transform urban mobility to be affordable, efficient and sustainable.