Roles of Artificial Intelligence in Urban Digital Twins and Governance

Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly used component in municipal operations, with applications spanning administrative automation, decision support, citizen interfaces, and predictive analytics across domains such as mobility, health and social services, and environmental management. While the literature documents benefits in operational efficiency and decision quality, most concrete evidence focuses primarily on internal efficiency. Urban digital twins have become commonplace in most European cities and smart cities globally. However, the role of AI within urban digital twins remains comparatively underexplored. This article addresses these gaps through a qualitative analysis of AI in Helsinki’s Experimentation Accelerator platform experiments and by comparing them against a DT framework based on the literature. Through this, we analyze how AI is piloted in municipal applications and how the identified use cases of AI align with the components of urban digital twins, identifying potential roles for AI in the urban digital twin as well as directions for future development.