Stop Selling “Smart City.” Start Selling the Thing That Actually Works.

A colleague in Bangkok sent me something last month that made me stop scrolling.

He’d been reviewing procurement data across a handful of ASEAN municipalities, trying to understand why so many “smart city” line items in city budgets kept getting quietly renamed, restructured, or dropped altogether after year two. Not cancelled outright. Just… rebranded into something else. A flood monitoring project. A cold chain upgrade. A dengue alert system.

Same money. Same sensors, half the time. Different name on the invoice.

Why does that happen?

The label became the liability

Here’s the uncomfortable finding buried in that data: in the very countries where “smart city” programs have run the longest, the term itself has started to carry baggage. Mention it in a council meeting now and you get polite nods and quiet skepticism. People have seen the glossy master plans. They’ve seen the dashboards nobody looks at after the ribbon-cutting. “Smart city” has become shorthand for over-promised and under-delivered, and everyone in the room knows it, even if nobody says it out loud.

I’ve sat in enough of those rooms myself, going back to my REDtone IoT and FAVORIOT days, to recognize the exact moment a pitch loses the audience. It’s not when the tech is weak. It’s the second you say “smart city” as the category, instead of naming the actual problem you’re solving.

Compare these two openings.

“We’re deploying a smart city platform for your municipality.”

Versus:

“We’re building a system that tells you a flood is coming to Nakhon Si Thammarat 36 hours before it hits, instead of after.”

One is a category. The other is a promise you can be held to.

Nakhon Si Thammarat isn’t hypothetical

I keep coming back to Nakhon Si Thammarat because it’s not a thought experiment. That province has taken real, repeated flood losses, year after year, the kind that show up in disaster relief budgets and insurance claims long before anyone writes a case study about them. Nobody there needs convincing that flood early warning has value. The ROI narrative writes itself: fewer evacuations done blind, fewer bridges washed out with no warning, fewer farmers finding out their fields are underwater from a neighbor’s phone call instead of a sensor.

That same budget line could have been labeled “smart city resilience initiative.” Would it have moved as fast through approval? I doubt it.

Vertical, not category

This is the part I think a lot of us in the industry got backwards for years. We built the category first, dengue and flood and cold chain as features, sub-modules living inside something bigger called Smart City. It felt efficient. One platform, many use cases, one procurement conversation.

But procurement doesn’t buy platforms. Health ministries buy outbreak prevention. Disaster management agencies buy lead time. Cold chain operators buy spoilage reduction they can put a ringgit figure next to. Nobody in those rooms has a budget line called “digital transformation.” They have a budget line called “vaccine wastage,” and that number is already too high, and somebody upstairs is asking why.

Cold chain monitoring, dengue and health surveillance, flood and disaster response, environmental monitoring, these are not features of a smart city. They are the smart city, minus a label that’s stopped helping and started hurting.

The money still often sits inside a smart city budget allocation. That part hasn’t changed. What’s changed is what you say out loud in the pitch meeting.

What I tell founders now

When a founder asks me how to position an IoT solution for government or municipal buyers these days, I tell them the same thing every time: find the named domain. Not the umbrella term. The named domain.

Don’t say you do smart agriculture. Say you cut fertilizer waste for palm oil smallholders by a measurable percentage. Don’t say you enable smart healthcare. Say you cut the time between a dengue cluster forming and a health officer knowing about it, from weeks to days.

Is this just marketing, a coat of paint on the same technology? Partly, yes. But it’s also something more honest than marketing. It’s an admission that “smart city” was always too big a promise for any single vendor, any single deployment, any single budget cycle to keep. The category asked cities to imagine a transformed future. The vertical asks them to solve a problem they already have a number attached to.

I’ve watched too many pilots die waiting for the transformed future to arrive. I’d rather help ship the flood warning that works.

The question worth sitting with

If you’re building or selling IoT into government right now, ask yourself honestly: could a mayor explain what you do in one sentence, using a number, without saying the words “smart city” at all?

If the answer is no, you don’t have a weak product. You have a pitch still hiding inside a category that’s already lost the room’s trust.

I wrote a deeper technical take on this over at IoT World.