City of Palermo Brings AI Innovation to Urban Management with K2K®
Palermo, September 30, 2025
Palermo today announces a strategic collaboration with K2K®, to enhance city operations with an advanced vision language model (VLM) customized for smart cities and spaces. This VLM is natively compliant with European regulations such as the Artificial Intelligence Act and General Data Protection Regulation.
This initiative marks a major step in Palermo’s digital transformation, improving how the city perceives, understands, and responds to daily urban challenges: from mobility and waste collection to public safety and environmental analysis.
Solving Real Urban Problems with AI
As Palermo continues its journey, the city faces growing challenges in traffic management, waste collection efficiency, and public service responsiveness. To address these issues, the municipality partnered with K2K®, whose Neural Networks Architectures integrate video AI and natural language understanding to make city data accessible and actionable in real time.
The K2K® Solution
Created with NVIDIA Blueprint for smart city AI, and Cosmos Curator on DGX Cloud, the VLM combines visual and linguistic intelligence within a single framework, bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds.
The solution can analyse live video feeds and sensor data, with NVIDIA Metropolis, capitalizing on existing sensor infrastructure, transforming the city’s visual data into structured knowledge, allowing city operators to query urban events using natural language and receive immediate visual and data driven responses.
Through predictive analytics, Palermo’s teams can now:
• Analyse and optimize Waste Management resources, reducing trash on streets.
• Improve traffic flow and incident response times
• Make decisions based on extracted environmental conditions to anticipate maintenance and safety needs
Why Palermo Chose K2K®
This collaboration marks a strategic turning point in the digital transformation of Palermo, a city that already has a well-established IT and telecommunications system and the right level of AI maturity that this “vision” requires.
Palermo selected K2K® for its proven expertise in AI architectures for smart cities and its ability to deploy scalable, compliant, and secure systems aligned with EU regulations, including the AI Act and GDPR.
In this vision, AI compliance is not a feature but the foundation of urban infrastructure, ensuring accountability, transparency, and trust with residents.
Current Results and Next Steps
The platform has been operating on Palermo’s certified municipal cloud infrastructure, provided by Nebius, an NVIDIA Certified Cloud Provider and managed in collaboration with SISPI Sistema Palermo Innovazione S.p.A.
By integrating perception, memory, and reasoning directly into its operational core, the city is moving from data-driven management to knowledge-based governance.
Next, Palermo plans to expand AI integration across mobility planning, environmental management, and citizen engagement platforms, paving the way for a more efficient, automated, and sustainable city.
“Palermo is proud to lead the creation of a true Smart City” said Prof. Roberto Lagalla, Mayor of the City of Palermo. “By combining technological innovation with regulatory principles, we are building a future where cities serve people with intelligence, responsibility, and vision.”
“With Palermo, we are defining a new global standard for what cities can become when technology and compliance advance together,” said Marco De Paoli, CEO of K2K®. “This is not simply about implementing another smart city solution, it’s about equipping cities with capabilities that allow them to see, understand, and act in real time while protecting citizens’ rights and trust. Palermo is showing how digital sovereignty and responsible AI can move forward hand in hand.”
About Palermo
Palermo, the capital of Sicily, is a historic Mediterranean hub of culture, innovation, and transformation.
A pioneer since the 1990s in the computerization of its administrative processes, the City has continued to invest in the transformation of its bureaucratic machinery, drawing on the expertise and services of its technology partner, SISPI, with which it has launched an ambitious digital modernization program in recent years, integrating its rich cultural heritage with future-oriented infrastructure investments.
Palermo's strategy emphasizes sustainability, inclusion, and technological sovereignty, making it a model for medium-sized European cities committed to the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence.
About K2K®
K2K® is a pioneer in cognitive artificial intelligence architectures, enabling urban environments and organizations to transform video and sensor data into actionable Knowledge, supporting the evolution of Smart Cities and Smart Spaces across the World.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA is a global leader in accelerated computing and AI infrastructure. Its platforms power the world’s most advanced AI systems and digital twins, enabling cities, industries, and governments to rethink the future of innovation.
