Kansas City can now make accurate predictions that save money while improving safety and convenience for its citizens. It started with every city’s chief annoyance—potholes. Combining several datasets including traffic patterns and road conditions, the city has been able to more accurately predict where potholes are likely to occur. “The Xaqt solution built on AWS enables us to perform preventive roadwork,” says Bennett. “We expect to save up to 50 percent compared to emergency repair.”

Advanced analytics are also helping the city identify vacant buildings, which typically need additional maintenance and attention. Xaqt combines datasets the city already has—such as permits and traffic—to pinpoint vacant structures with 85 percent accuracy.

An even more ambitious goal is to use big data to understand crime patterns and gauge prevention effectiveness. “We are combining crime statistics with transit, weather, education, and other data and then testing a variety of predictive models. We want to show correlations among conditions that lead to crime and the interventions that work,” says Bennett. “That might mean building a pool in a particular area or providing targeted education funding based on evidence, rather than blanketing an area with programs and hoping they work.”

The city continues to move aggressively into the future. With Xaqt, it is looking at taking advantage of Amazon Alexa and Amazon Lex as public-facing interfaces to data, enabling natural-language voice queries such as “Where’s my bus?” It is also considering using automated chat bots in applications such as Facebook and Slack to tell people what their commute looks like. “Because of the cost structure and agility of AWS, we have been able to launch the Alexa pilot as a free service,” says Crosby.

The solution is also attracting partners across the region, including the states of Kansas and Missouri, which are providing access to more than four million vehicle records per day from highway ramps for regional analytics. The city’s KCMO Smart City Open Access portal has been accessed by partners more than 50 times since going live. Bennett says, “From a digital perspective, we’re getting to a single data lake for regional data, turning this from a smart city into a smart region.” Crosby concurs, saying, “We are helping cities transition from being simply providers of infrastructure to providing rich information services to citizens.”