GISCafe Weekly Review : January 10, 2025

Brian Kingery

Chaz Mateer

Pioneering the Future of GIS: Predicting GIS Industry Patterns in 2025

The frontier for transformative change may be upon the GIS world, driven by rapid change in artificial intelligence, generative technologies, and integrated geospatial intelligence. As 2025 begins, the world will see the landscape of how GIS can expand in ways that unlock unprecedented capability for efficiency, decision making, and innovation. We are not only adapting to these changes but actively driving them, ensuring our clients remain at the cutting edge of geospatial technology.

The State of GIS Today
For decades, GIS technology has provided unparalleled capabilities for mapping, spatial analysis, and data visualization. These tools have powered industries ranging from urban planning and resource management to emergency response and environmental conservation. Traditional GIS tools, such as Esri’s ArcGIS, have set the stage for the integration of AI by offering robust environments for analyzing spatial data. Yet, the complexity and sheer volume of modern datasets call for solutions that go beyond traditional methodologies.

By Juliet Su, Product Development Manager, Noteworty

Juliet Su

GIS Data in 2025: The Foundation for Utility Distribution Grid Modernization and Resilience

As utilities embrace the challenges of the ongoing energy transition, geospatial data collection and analytics are emerging as foundational elements for modernizing grid operations and enhancing resilience. To meet the ever-increasing need for accurate, high-quality, and up-to-date geospatial information, utilities are shifting away from legacy boots-on-the-ground inspection methods in favor of more innovative solutions, such as drones, asset-mounted hardware, vehicle-mounted inspection systems, and other smart grid monitoring technologies. Utilities that effectively integrate and scale these technologies will be better positioned to navigate the demands of widespread electrification, ensuring a smarter, more resilient grid for the future.

The Scope of the Challenge

The scale of distribution infrastructure is immense, presenting challenges distinct from those of its generation and transmission counterparts. In the United States alone, estimates from groups such as EEI and the American Galvanizers Association suggest there are between 140 and 180 million utility poles. Each pole, often equipped with transformers, insulators, switches, and other hardware, contributes to billions of distinct assets utilities must manage.

By Piers Dormeyer, EagleView CEO

Piers Dormeyer

Technological Innovations: “What major technological advancements or innovations do you foresee occurring in your industry in 2025, and how do you plan to adapt or lead in these areas?”

As a technologist at heart and by training, I’m always interested in the technical developments and advances happening in the industries we are a part of. As I look ahead, I continue to believe we will see changes as a result of machine learning and the increasing adoption of AI – which should come as no big surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Among the areas we are paying particularly close attention to includes feature extraction, agentic AI and the larger landscape of digital transformation.

We have observed that machine learning-based feature extraction is accelerating customer demand for aerial imagery. With that, higher resolution imagery is desired to unlock new insights and increase data accuracy in more and more industries. These new categories of customers are coming to us asking for new and easier integration options that have high performance and availability so that they can build new solutions and workflows. It’s why last year we built out a team particularly focused on new landscape growth because more and more people are understanding how to utilize aerial imagery.

Beyond that, and more broadly, we believe agentic AI will take center stage as a way to boost the benefits of current state GenAI tools and models. Current GenAI solutions have plateaued in their effectiveness in driving productivity for business users. And, agent-based AI architectures can make large models more effective at reasoning in specialized domains, performing computational tasks, and executing on complex workflows. This is both true in the geospatial industry but also broadly and we will be embracing this idea in our forthcoming products.