Here are three opportunities to create AI assistants that help city staff and residents act on records the cities already hold.
- Pristina’s mobility planners already hold the schedules, traffic data, and resident complaints needed to redraw a bus route. The city’s use-case brief names evidence synthesis as the bottleneck.
- Skopje’s tree registry falls behind because tree-removal approvals sit in permit files across several departments.
- In Rivne, Ukraine, the stakes are higher. Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal told POLITICO that Russian strikes have cut Ukraine’s generating capacity from 54.5GW before the war to as little as 12GW now.
$40,000 Funding Opportunity
The GenAI for Good Challenge: Cities Edition funds open-source generative AI tools for one of three city use cases:
- Pristina, Kosovo: a transit route-planning assistant that answers planners’ questions in Albanian, Serbian, or English, citing a source for every answer
- Skopje, North Macedonia: a green infrastructure assistant that extracts tree data from Macedonian-language permits and proposes Cadastre updates for staff review
- Rivne, Ukraine: an energy advisory assistant that turns building profiles into retrofit recommendations and rough payback estimates
IEEE Humanitarian Technologies will select nine finalists, three per city. Each finalist receives a $10,000 grant for prototype development. One team per city then becomes eligible for an innovation award of up to $30,000 to pilot its tool through December 31, 2027.
Teams of at least two individuals can apply, build on the GENIE AI framework, and release all code, data, and models under a permissive license such as Apache 2.0 or MIT.
Apply Now: Deadline is December 13, 2026
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