Practical AI for Cities: ViewPro at the Texas A&M AI Symposium

AI is everywhere in the conversation about how we plan, design and build. The harder question is what it takes to make AI useful inside a city hall or county office on an ordinary Tuesday. That was the question ViewPro brought to College Station this October.

An industry conversation, in one room

On October 5–6, 2026, the Texas A&M University College of Architecture hosted its first AI Symposium, AI Across the AEC Industry, at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center. The event brought together faculty from the college's three departments (Architecture; Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning; and Construction Science) with practitioners from architecture, engineering, construction and planning firms.

The format paired academic research with industry practice. Sessions put scholars and practitioners side by side, followed by moderated panels. Over two days, speakers covered everything from AI-assisted building code review to digital twins, construction jobsites and zoning as data.

Tesla vs Toyota: practical AI for local government

ViewPro founder and CEO Suhag Kansara spoke on Day 2 with a talk titled "Tesla vs Toyota – Practical Use of AI for Cities & Local Government." The talk focused on how cities and counties can put AI to practical use in their day-to-day work.

Why this matters for cities and counties

ViewPro works with local governments every day on GIS, planning workflows and citizen services. In that work, the gap between AI's promise and day-to-day reality is easy to see. Many teams are stretched thin, and the data a new tool depends on is often spread across systems that don't talk to each other.

That's why we focus on practical steps: getting data in order, fitting new tools into the workflows staff already use, and measuring results in hours saved and faster responses to residents. Events like this symposium matter because they put the people researching these tools in the same room as the people who use them.

Thank you

Thank you to the Texas A&M College of Architecture for organizing the symposium and inviting ViewPro to take part, and to everyone who stayed after the sessions to keep the conversation going.

Want to talk about practical AI for your city or county? Book a demo with our team →

Learn more about the event: AI Across the AEC Industry – Texas A&M College of Architecture

Photos: College of Architecture Marketing and Communications