ADAPTIVE INTELLIGENCE

ACTIVATING URBAN AI

The 2025 Urban Tech Summit returned to Roosevelt Island in New York City on November 11-12, 2025. Thank you to all of the speakers, sponsors, and attendees who helped make this year’s Summit our biggest and most successful to date. Over two days, the Summit offered practical insights and examples of how researchers, companies, governments, and communities can continue to drive innovation amid these headwinds—and how urban tech can help cities do more with less as they prepare for the future.

View the full program to learn more about the key topics, themes, and speakers from the 2025 Summit.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"Last year, I met collaborators at this very summit who shared a vision for using AI to strengthen community-led climate adaptation. A year later, we returned — with our community partners and a working AI application— to show what happens when community and technology grow together."

Jamil Ellis, Unified Ground
"So many great minds and influential people (with a considerable overlap between the groups 😊) gathered for 2 days of non-stop top-notch content about the future of our cities. Lots of exciting innovation sprinkled with philosophy and existentialism, a spectrum between super technical solutions and ideological futurism - I am truly inspired, and grateful that I also got to share some of my work."

Nitsan Bartov, Henning Larsen
"Had an incredible time at the Urban Tech Summit at Cornell Tech yesterday! Spending time with thoughtful, interdisciplinary experts across government, academia and tech and talking through some of our cities biggest challenges made me truly hopeful for the future - if this group is working on it, our cities are in good hands."

Eyal Feder Levy, Zencity
“It’s a small world, if you come here, it's like an alumni reunion. The people you know and need to know come to the Urban Tech Summit

Paul McConnell, Noble
"What an incredible two days here at the #UrbanTechSummit2025 by The Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute! I'm genuinely humbled and grateful to be part of this growing #NYC #UrbanTech community, evolving from a bunch of individuals exploring how the challenges and opportunities of cities, technology, governance, data, and academia intersect, into a vibrant ecosystem driving real change.

Dana Chermesh-Reshef, inCitu
"Thanks Michael Samuelian, Anthony Townsend and the great team at Cornell Tech for organizing one of the best events on cities+tech and urban AI."

Ariel Noyman, MIT

PROGRAM

SNAPSHOT

FOUR GRAND CHALLENGES

This year’s Summit focused on four “grand challenges” that cities must act on to prepare for the hazards ahead.

BUILD

AI-Accelerated Construction: Building Climate-Ready Cities

Cities face an urgent timeline to build and retrofit infrastructure for climate resilience. As construction costs rise and project timelines lengthen, the window for adapting our cities is closing. This Grand Challenge explores how AI can dramatically accelerate planning, design, permitting, and construction processes to prepare cities to adapt to a changing climate.

POWER

AI + Grid Resilience: Powering Climate-Ready Cities

Grid decentralization is good for decarbonization—making it easier to integrate renewable, distributed energy resources. But, it's even more effective in boosting resilience, allowing microgrids to operate independently when regional systems fail. This Grand Challenge asks how the AI boom’s growing demand for electricity could undermine current energy resilience plans, and how we might harness AI itself to shock them back to life.

MOVE

AI-Powered Infrastructure: Transforming Urban Mobility Networks

Climate change is disrupting how cities move—weakening the systems that connect people, goods, and information. As traditional infrastructure faces growing stress, AI presents powerful tools to redesign and fortify urban mobility networks for long-term sustainability. This Grand Challenge investigates AI applications that orchestrate and optimize more distributed, dynamic, and responsive networks and services.

BOOST

AI for Community Mobilization: Advancing Inclusive Adaptation

Urban climate adaptation is everyone’s work—government and industry can’t do it alone. This Grand Challenge takes a deep dive into harnessing AI for engagement. How do we deepen the adaptive capacity of communities by connecting them to the right knowledge, networks, and tools? We’ll explore how AI can be used to reach the most vulnerable and isolated, demonstrate the benefits of adaptation projects in impacted communities, and map out the tools and platforms that could power future resilience hubs.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, established jointly by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is based at Cornell Tech in New York City and embodies its mission by spearheading the inception, translation into practice, and incubation of new computational technologies that advance human and societal well-being, while empowering graduate students to be the next generation of tech leaders.

CIV:LAB aims to strengthen the civic and social infrastructure in and with our communities to tackle civilization’s greatest problems. Using collaboration as a vehicle for social change, CIV:LAB funds and enables programs, projects and products on the ground addressing problems in cities. CIV:LAB is a 501(c)(3) based in New York City at Civic Hall.

Emergence builds brands, engages communities, and drives behavior change in the pursuit of genuine social transformation. As a global creative agency rooted in social impact, Emergence collaborates exclusively with partners dedicated to the common good. From health to society to the environment, Emergence is confronting some of the most urgent challenges of our time with strategies that promote human well-being.

THANK YOU TO OUR 2025 SPONSORS

CONTACT US

Interested in sponsoring next year’s Summit or have a question about the event? Send us a note.