The AI Imperative—Mapping The New Possibilities For Business Success

Here’s a simple answer that explains why AI is the focus of so many conversations: With this technology, business teams can reset the boundaries for what’s possible.

Consider a luxury seafood company based in Nova Scotia that has significantly increased its catch using AI-driven analysis of marine territories and species. Or the world’s largest telecommunications company, which can determine where its communications towers and other equipment are most vulnerable to extreme storms and floods brought on by climate change. Similarly, a leading US shipping company uses AI to forecast when its cargo planes will require new parts—squeezing more efficiency out of its supply chains.

AI alone is transformative but its integration with the powerful mapping and data management tool, geographic information system (GIS) technology–creating what is known as GeoAI– multiples its impact. This powerful combination not only opens new doors but also provides a comprehensive toolkit for businesses to refine their strategies and operations. GeoAI enables a deeper, real-time understanding of business opportunities, environmental impacts, and operational risks, empowering companies to innovate continuously.

AI scours massive libraries of data to extract useful information. GIS organizes that information and makes it visible and ready for analysis on real-time maps and dashboards. This enables greater clarity for organizations to answer simple but critical questions like:

Where exactly are the opportunities, impacts, and risks?

Where are our best customers and locations and where are they likely to be in the future? Where are essential resources and how can we operate in those places with the least impact on the environment?

Where are assets in danger from rising seas, extreme heat, or other climate risks?

With GeoAI, the answers are calculated at speeds and scales that were unimaginable only a few years ago. One executive has described GeoAI as “almost the holy grail for a maintenance operation.”

Solutions Designed for the Unique Challenges of the Executive Suite

Three powerful capabilities emerge with the joining of AI and GIS:

• Automate tasks and repeat them quickly at scale to optimize business processes across an enterprise while gaining situational awareness of operations, assets, and supply chains.
• Look at past patterns to make predictions and acquire insights for decisions based on predefined criteria or objectives.
• Find patterns hidden in large amounts of data to detect correlations within customer demographics, economics, and geographies.

Their application is useful across a wide range of industries.

A retailer considering where to locate stores or other physical assets can study available commercial properties, local customer preferences, and existing service providers.

A business owner can define energy use patterns in buildings and pinpoint opportunities to lower costs and boost sustainability.

A transportation planner can estimate how far people will likely travel for specific goods and services.

An insurance company can predict flooding or wildfire damage—at the neighborhood level.

A manufacturer or logistics team can optimize supply chains using disparate data like weather forecasts, estimations of ship and rail traffic backups, or the number of left turns drivers make on their routes.

Additionally, GeoAI equips executives across an organization with a tool for problem-solving that leverages the power of geography, or location:

• Chief executive officers can access near real-time analysis for the many decisions that hinge on where, when, and why. GeoAI is an enterprise tool with wide-ranging value in everything from planning how to drive growth to assessing implications of policy changes and market trends.
• Chief operations officers can improve operational awareness across the enterprise with maps, dashboards, and remote-sensing devices for monitoring assets and resources. They can quantify how events in one area impact the supply chain. Using GeoAI for prediction, they can prioritize asset and infrastructure maintenance, avoiding costly delays and shutdowns.
• Chief risk officers can map resources and assets to develop strategies for reducing exposure to climate impacts before they affect balance sheets. They can proactively reduce environmental impact. Forecasting to understand customer behavior across different regions can guide decisions on spending and investment.
• Chief information officers can build technology solutions that advance their organization’s operating model, improving service delivery and governance. Across the enterprise, business teams gain geographic context in their analysis of financial and customer relationship data. Off-site monitoring and data collection and management become more efficient and cost-effective with GeoAI tools for automation.

Predicting What’s Next

In an ever-changing business world, it’s harder than ever to know what comes next. But with GeoAI, executives gain the data-driven insights and predictive abilities they need.

Across the enterprise, executives can leverage GeoAI to better visualize challenges and opportunities, deepen analysis, and deliver comprehensive strategies.

They can redefine what’s possible.

See how organizations are applying spatial problem-solving with GeoAI. And explore the advantages of AI with location intelligence from GIS.