Creative Cities – IndoFrench AI

There is a need for a continuous conversation about the best way to shape the future of Indian cities. This conversation will take place across multiple cities, with learnings from each other.

Therefore, it is proposed to hold an ‘Imagining Indian Cities’ Workshop annually in different Indian places. The first of those took place in Bangalore from 10 to 15 March 2025. These Workshops will gather academics, practitioners and urban innovators in multi-day get-together. Half of each conference will focus on the host city, and the other half will be for learnings from elsewhere.

This ‘Creative Bangalore’ Workshop was organised by the Indian think tank iSPIRT Foundation and supported by IISc/IUDX, IIHS and Dassault Systèmes, for bringing together various participants, chosen to form a sustainable collective capable of shedding light on a certain number of key questions and moving towards increasingly measurable contributions.

The second Indian city we have explored was Hyderabad, in the context of an AI Impact Summit preparatory event.

On Thursday, January 29, 2026, the Franco-Indian workshop — a preparatory event to the AI Impact Summit — “Urban AI Forum: Rethinking Cities Leveraging Artificial Intelligence” was held on the IIIT Hyderabad campus.

Organized by the iSPIRT Foundation, Bordeaux Métropole, IIIT-H, and Nasscom, in partnership with IUDX, the Smart City Research Center Hyderabad, the Smart Cities Mission of Bordeaux Métropole, the Hyderabad Urban Lab, the Paris Region Institute, Dassault Systèmes, and the Government of Telangana, the event featured four roundtables attended by approximately one hundred participants. The last three roundtables were open to the public.

The diversity of the participants, mostly French and Indian, from Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Paris, and Bordeaux, was impressive: university professors specializing in Data Science (IUDX, Institut Paris Région), policymakers (NITI Aayog’s Frontier Tech Hub, Hexagon, Raminfo, GHMC), researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRD, Hyderabad Urban Lab, IIT-H), as well as public project leaders (Nasscom, SPEED projects of the Telangana government) all distinguished themselves and collectively identified future directions.