MAESTRO Executive Assistant: AI-Powered, Data-Driven Municipal Management

Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality invites innovative technology providers, research institutions, and smart city experts to join as solution partners for the MAESTRO Executive Assistant initiative. As rapid population growth and expanding service demands generate massive volumes of fragmented urban data, MAESTRO is being developed to transform municipal administration into a highly secure, data-driven, and predictive decision-support system. By building upon the city’s existing IT infrastructure, the platform shifts urban management from a reactive posture to a proactive, transparent, and sustainable governance model where investments, budgetary decisions, and public services are guided by concrete, comparative data.

The core challenge lies in aggregating and dynamically correlating heavily fragmented datasets across the municipality. MAESTRO integrates call center records, citizen applications, complaint logs, demographic and census data, social assistance distributions, utility metrics, mobile app engagement analytics, and granular financial expenditures. By conducting multi-dimensional evaluations across specific service types, neighborhood districts, timeframes, and demographic cohorts, the system allows municipal leaders to map the city's precise spatial and socio-economic needs with high fidelity while synthesizing complex raw data into actionable executive summaries. To ensure strict compliance with Turkey's Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK), the architecture never exposes raw personal data, operating solely on authorized, aggregated, and structured live data streams to inherently prevent AI misinformation and hallucinations. Furthermore, by correlating personnel allocations with department budgets, operational expenditures, and workloads, MAESTRO provides leadership with a unified dashboard to optimize human resources, evaluate spending efficiency, and predict future operational risks.

To successfully realize this vision, the municipality is soliciting partners across five distinct collaboration tracks: Proof of Concept pilot testing to validate AI algorithms in controlled sandboxes, co-development to jointly construct predictive pipelines and system architectures with municipal IT teams, dedicated R&D services for complex data correlation and text processing, specialized consultancy for data governance and system scaling, and participation as a co-applicant in Horizon Europe Consortia for transnational smart city funding calls.

Prospective partners must align with several non-negotiable operational and technical criteria. Solutions must follow a collaborative co-development model rather than a turn-key, off-the-shelf software delivery. Due to strict data sovereignty policies and legal restrictions under KVKK, cloud hosting is strictly prohibited, requiring all solutions and datasets to be deployed entirely on-premise within secure local municipal servers in Turkey. The challenge is open to agile startups provided they demonstrate robust technical capability and advanced cybersecurity expertise, with flexible Technology Readiness Level expectations based on solution criticality. Finally, partners must implement end-to-end technical and administrative cybersecurity protocols, ensure incoming datasets are pre-structured for effective modeling, and collaborate with municipal leadership to define clear success metrics at project launch.