AI4Waste: Autonomous Demand-Based Waste Management

AI4Waste is an AI and IoT platform that helps cities manage waste collection and street cleaning with real-time data instead of fixed schedules. Rather than adding new infrastructure, it turns vehicles a city already operates, collection trucks, sweepers, taxis and buses, into a moving sensor network. Cameras on these vehicles feed edge-AI models, trained on millions of images, that detect waste on the ground, whether containers are full or empty, worker safety compliance, and the condition of roads and other city assets. The platform pairs this detection layer with an operations layer. City officials get a live, city-wide cleanliness map they can read in one view, and field crews receive optimized, demand-driven routes that cut collection cost and reduce vehicle kilometers, and therefore emissions. Because the AI runs on the vehicle and transmits only what matters, communication and compute costs stay low, which keeps the model affordable to scale across a whole city. AI4Waste is deployed in 14 cities across three countries, serving more than 10 million citizens daily, and is running a proof of concept with Dubai Municipality. Insight Solutions builds its own hardware and software, which keeps deployments fast and adaptable to local conditions. Our mid-to-long-term objective, and the project we are raising investment for, is to develop fully autonomous waste-collection vehicles. The perception, mapping and routing intelligence we already run across city fleets becomes the foundation for vehicles that collect on their own, and the operational data from AI4Waste is what makes that step possible. For the Belt and Road Summit, Insight Solutions is seeking co-investment and partnership to scale AI4Waste across the Gulf and Belt and Road markets and to fund this move toward autonomous collection, working with municipalities, operators and infrastructure partners.