Dubai Ranks as World's Second-Smartest City in New BCG Index

London topped the ranking with 85 points. Dubai followed with 80 points, edging out New York in third place, Washington DC in fourth, and Amsterdam in fifth. The index covered 61 cities across 39 countries, making it one of the broadest smart-city studies published this year.

BCG built the index around five domains:

• Outcomes for residents
• City strategy
• Adoption of digital tools
• Ways of working inside government
• Enablers, such as data and infrastructure, that make services possible

Each city's score reflects performance across all five, not just one strength.

How the index works

Every domain has its own category leader. London topped resident outcomes, meaning residents there report the best quality of life and access to opportunity from smart services. Madrid led on strategy, and Amsterdam topped enablers, the infrastructure and data layer other services build on. New York led ways of working, the domain that scores how efficiently a city's own departments use digital tools internally.

Dubai's strongest showing was in adoption, where it ranked first in the world. Adoption measures how far a city has moved from having smart-city plans on paper to residents and businesses actually using them day to day, including AI-based tools. BCG also sorted every city into one of four maturity bands — leading, accelerating, emerging, and developing — based on overall progress across all five domains combined, rather than any single score.

Where Dubai excelled

BCG credited Dubai's result to translating smart-city strategy into real-world use across transport, public services, and urban planning. AI deployment was strong, and residents actually use the apps regularly rather than just downloading them. That combination of adoption and follow-through, rather than any single flagship project, is what the report's authors pointed to as the real test of a smart city.

Dr. Akram Awad, one of the report's authors at BCG, said the strongest-performing cities pair investment in technology with investment in people. "That combination gives cities a strong foundation to continue improving how people live, work and interact with public services," he said.

Fellow author Rami Mourtada said Dubai's showing was not a one-off. "The UAE's trajectory in this Index reflects that balance, and it sets a replicable benchmark for cities worldwide," he said.

For residents, the ranking is less about bragging rights than a signal. The apps and portals already in daily use are being measured against the rest of the world, and coming out near the top. London still leads on the outcomes that matter most to residents directly, so the gap between "most used" and "most useful" has not fully closed.

This is the first edition of BCG's Intelligent Cities Index, so there is no earlier score to compare Dubai's result against, and it is not yet known whether the firm will repeat the exercise next year.