Artificial intelligence is coming to a garage near you.
Car owners may have noticed that parking garages around the state are going ticketless, with paper stubs being replaced by QR codes.
The push to revolutionize parking with AI is being led by a company called Metropolis. Co-founder Courtney Fukuda is from Hawaiʻi, and her company has quickly become the largest parking network in North America and has secured more than $1 billion in funding.
HPR spoke with Fukuda to learn more about her company and how AI is driving change in parking garages across the country.
Interview Highlights
How Metropolis works
FUKUDA: We use artificial intelligence and computer vision to eliminate the friction of parking. When you park at a Metropolis garage, you just drive in, you drive out, it works. There's no tickets, there are no gates, there's no cash. That's the experience that we've enabled. Fundamentally, we're building artificial intelligence for the real world. Broadly, we use computer vision, as, you know, the basis to power these frictionless, personalized experiences. And we started with parking because it's ubiquitous and it remains, honestly, pretty hopelessly analog. And now we've become the largest operator of parking garages in North America. You know, we manage about 4,500 locations. And recently, as you experienced, expanded to Hawaiʻi, which has been super special.
On privacy concerns with AI
FUKUDA: From our perspective, everything is opt-in. It's permission-based. It's privacy first… and so because of that, we're not doing it as surveillance. We're not taking some sort of video feed. We're recognizing an entry event and an exit event. We don't sell any of that data. All of this, you know, we take security so seriously. We've built it into every step of our engineering system. Of course, we're fully compliant with all of the federal and state privacy laws, but more importantly, we don't collect this data to sell it. We do it so that we can train our models to better recognize vehicles and enable the seamless experience, first in parking and then anywhere else where there might be a retail transaction from your car.
On AI's impact on the job market
FUKUDA: One line that one of my colleagues said recently is, your job is not going to be replaced by AI, your job might be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI. I really think AI and technological advancements are enabling greater productivity and enabling us to do more and contribute more, as opposed to just focus on cost-cutting or eliminating jobs that are necessary. I would say at Metropolis specifically, as we think about growing our presence, it's absolutely our goal to create value locally, not just to deploy our technology and leave, and so that's a conversation that I'm personally actively a part of.
Metropolis currently manages parking at locations including the Hilo and Kona airports and SALT at Kaka’ako. Their next launch will be next month at the former Gold Bond Building, 677 Ala Moana in Kaka’ako.
This story aired on The Conversation on March 27, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
