The trade fair took place from 17 to 22 March 2026 in the centres of the Taiwanese metropolises of Taipei and Kaohsiung. The thirteenth edition of the international Smart City Summit & Expo (SCSE) conference ran alongside the third edition of the Net Zero City Expo. More than 170,000 visitors attended, along with delegations from 174 cities in 53 countries around the world. Over 600 technology corporations and 250 startups presented their solutions here at two and a half thousand stands. The reason for this gathering was not just theoretical discussion, but also the need to respond to the looming overload of energy networks, the ageing of the population and the unsustainable carbon footprint of modern civilisation.
The fundamental finding from this year's edition is the fact that collecting data alone is no longer enough for municipalities. Historically, IoT devices from various suppliers were installed in the streets, but they did not understand one another. Various cameras and sensors worked separately and required complex manual operation. The current market trend is therefore the deployment of unified control systems. These, often cloud-based, platforms can integrate fragmented data into a single, clear central dashboard. Thanks to this, artificial intelligence can begin to work predictively. It can, for example, deduce a forming traffic jam from the movement of vehicles and automatically adjust the throughput of intersections before the problem actually occurs.
With the advent of artificial intelligence and ongoing digitisation, cities are facing a sharp rise in electricity consumption. Our current electrical grids are simply not built for such a surge. The solution presented at the fair, however, is not the construction of further giant power plants. Instead, cities are betting on so-called virtual power plants. In practice, this is a smart computer program that connects, for example, solar panels on rooftops, parked electric cars and smart building management systems into one large network. Then, when consumption in the city suddenly rises and the grid is at risk of overload, the program automatically "borrows" energy from these thousands of small batteries. Ordinary households and businesses thus send their stored electricity back at a critical moment, together saving the city from a power outage.
Another clear shift is the deployment of robots in industry and services. This is not some utopian attempt to replace the human workforce across the board, but a response to the ageing of the population and the chronic shortage of staff in critical sectors. This was most clearly shown in the presented data from healthcare. Here the new technologies do not make the actual medical decisions, but primarily take over exhausting routine administration and provide continuous monitoring of physiological functions. Specialist staff can thus devote their limited time exclusively to real patient care.
The changes shown by this year's Smart City Summit & Expo may be ending the era of superficial experiments in cities. Over the coming five years, urban planning will shift from buying hardware to building secure software. The main brake on development, meanwhile, will not be the technologies themselves, but outdated legislation and the need to ensure complete protection of citizens' privacy in an environment that depends on massive data collection.
