A smart city is defined as a one that provides solutions to rapid urbanization, exploding population, scarce resources, congested traffic, and energy management through the effective and integrated use of information and communication technology. The conceptualization, integration, and implementation of smart cities have been recognized and seen as a means to optimize the limited resources and improve the quality of human lives. The smart cities planning, designing, and development have been affected due to big data storage, big data governance, Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The smart cities’ solutions cover different themes of varying importance such as smart health, smart education, intelligent transportation, smart energy, smart governance, etc. The emerging technologies are the one which are presently under development or might be developed in the future, and which can have a wide impact on research, business, and social lives. The emerging technologies are the groups of technologies that have been partially explored, continuously evolving, and under development such as, IoT, big data, machine learning (ML), social network, and cloud computing. The emerging technologies have created renewed interest in smart cities’ solutions. The smart cities’ progress and advancement are the results of the successful exploitation of emerging technologies.This paper aims to investigate and discuss the success stories of emerging technologies in smart cities’ solutions. The emerging technologies included in the study are the IoT, big data, and AI. The paper further summarizes a process of applying tools and techniques for the successful initiative of transforming a traditional city into a smart one using emerging technologies.