Singapore is the most prepared city for AI disruption: study

It bested 104 cities based on vision, activation, asset base, and trajectory.

Singapore was crowned the most prepared city for disruption by artificial intelligence, scoring 75.8 out of 100 according to Oliver Wyman Forum index.

London and New York followed with scores of 75.6 and 72.7, respectively. Rounding out the top 10 are San Francisco (71.9), Paris (71.0), Stockholm (70.4), Amsterdam (68.6), Boston (68.5), Berlin (67.3), and Sydney (67.3).

However, the report noted that none of them were in top 20 across all four categories, or appeared in the top 10 across at least three.

"Most cities plan to use AI to become ‘smart cities’ or the next Silicon Valley, but few focus on the bigger, strategic social and economic opportunities and challenges, such as the need to retrain people who may be forced to look for new work as a result of the broad deployment of AI," Oliver Wyman Forum’s City Readiness initiative co-leader Timocin Pervane said.

In Asia, fourteen entered the top 20 cities noted to have made the biggest strides in aligning with the requirements to succeed amidst an age of AI. Eight of them are located in China.

The index scored 104 cities according to four criteria, namely vision or the quality of a city's plan, activation or the ability to execute on the so-called forward-looking plans, asset base or the extent and quality of talent, education and infrastructure, and trajectory or the impact of the interplay between activation and asset base on its overall momentum.