Connect your AI tools to City Connect
Think about the work it takes to keep a city centre running: coordinating updates, managing events, communicating with entrepreneurs, reporting to the municipality and keeping everyone doing business in the area connected. Then ask how much of that work your AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot can actually help with today. That gap is what keeps AI from becoming truly useful in urban management: helping teams use what they know about their area to get practical work done, while keeping people in control at every step. It's exactly the gap we're closing.
With the Chainels connector, City Connect communities works directly with the AI tools your team uses every day. City Connect takes routine work out of managing an area. This is the next step: the same foundation, connected to any AI tool your organisation chooses.
Why this matters now
Area management teams, municipalities and business improvement districts are usually focused on more immediate questions: how to keep entrepreneurs informed, coordinate local activity, report clearly to stakeholders and stay present in the area. The value of connecting AI to City Connect is that it supports those practical jobs directly, instead of introducing another separate tool to manage. Many public organisations have standardised on Copilot because they run on Microsoft. Others use ChatGPT or Claude, and some are building their own internal agents. A platform that supports only one of those makes that choice for them, which no city team should have to accept.
Behind that question sits a very practical goal. Across an area team, the week fills with the same kind of work: updates to write for entrepreneurs, event participation to coordinate, reports to compile for the municipality and the board, and entrepreneur engagement to track. Every one of those tasks connects to information and workflows already in City Connect, from years of messages, surveys, events and conversations with the entrepreneurs in your area. Connect the AI your organisation chose to City Connect and those hours shrink to the time it takes to review and approve, while your people spend their days in the streets they manage, with the entrepreneurs who make the area.
For city centre managers the change is sharpest. City centres are often managed by a small team, sometimes just one or two people, standing between hundreds of independent entrepreneurs, the municipality and a board that expects evidence. For many BIDs a renewal ballot depends on proving that value. The communication alone is a full-time job, and the reporting that demonstrates the area's worth, campaigns joined, events attended, updates read and issues resolved, competes directly with being present in the street. Connect your AI to City Connect and that balance shifts. The board report comes together from the area's real activity, every entrepreneur hears about the roadworks in time, and the manager is back where the job actually happens: in the centre, with the people who run it.
What you can do once your AI is connected
City Connect's own AI features handle the common tasks. When you need to look across a whole district or act in several places at once, you can connect your own AI tools through the Chainels connector. You connect once, sign in with your City Connect account, and work from there.
- Work across your area at once. Ask for an update about upcoming roadworks for every street they affect, and each community gets its own version, with its own dates and details, ready for your review. Add the city centre's event calendar, and your AI can draft and schedule updates for the whole year in no time.
- Understand what's happening. Ask "Which parts of the city centre saw engagement drop this quarter?" and get the answer straight from your own data, with no exports or pivot tables in between.
- Your tools, your rules. Whether you connect from Copilot, from Claude or from any other AI tool that supports the connection, you work with the same data under the same permissions, just without the UI in between.
A new kind of coworker
The simplest way to understand what we've built is this: your AI tool can now act on your behalf in City Connect. It works through your account, sees only what you're allowed to see, and does the work you approve, much like a colleague operating within the boundaries you set.
Behind the scenes this runs on the Chainels connector, our new MCP server. It's built on the Model Context Protocol, an open industry standard introduced by Anthropic and adopted by OpenAI and Google.
The open standard is where the benefits come from. One Chainels connector covers every AI tool, the ones your teams use today and whichever comes next, with no separate integration project per vendor. Your existing integrations do not change either: the systems your area depends on keep working exactly as they do today.
Safe by design
City centres and Business Improvement Districts carry a special responsibility for how they communicate, and the connection is designed around that. Your AI tool acts on your behalf through your normal City Connect account, which means it can only see and do what you can see and do. If you're responsible for one shopping street, your AI sees that street and nothing else, and if you manage the whole city centre, it can work across the centre. Anything an agent creates lands as a draft and is published only when you give the go-ahead, because an update that reaches every entrepreneur in the area deserves a human yes.
How to get access
The connection is live today. In order to have access to it, you will first need to sign an AI-addendum. To do this, please contact your Account Manager.
Interested in the Intelligent Urban Operating System? Book a demo.