GISCafé industry predictions 2024 – Pointr

By Ray Weaver,  CMO, Pointr

Ray Weaver

2023 was unquestionably the year that AI went from being the stuff of science fiction to reality in the public consciousness. It now impacts a huge range of everyday tasks, and of course the GIS industry is no exception.

In my opinion, the most clear industry trend we’ll see in 2024 is a greater synergy between mapping and AI. The GIS tools we have at our disposal today are more detailed and powerful than ever before, but the actual process of creating any sort of map has remained relatively static for many years now – it’s laborious, time-consuming, and prone to human error.

AI, however, presents us with an opportunity to produce maps at scale without requiring strict human oversight at every stage. By automating certain tasks while creating maps – such as identifying which features from the original source (such as a CAD file) need to be included and which can be excluded – and then applying these en masse, AI can save enormous amounts of time with little to no impact on the quality of the finished product. Furthermore, thanks to machine learning and human feedback, the more maps an AI-assisted tool is tasked with creating, the more accurate it will become over time, creating a virtuous cycle.

At Pointr, our MapScale® tool is already reaping the rewards of AI-enablement. We developed MapScale® as a direct solution to a client, who came to us with an problem: they were manually creating and updating maps by hand in image editing software. The issue? They had more than 2,000 locations to map, meaning that once a map for a certain location had been created or updated, it could be months before the client had a chance to review the map again, during which time it would have almost certainly become out of date.

MapScale® has the capability of taking the same architectural files that the client’s team was using to manually map their locations, understanding which elements need preserving and rendering in the map and which don’t, and finally producing beautiful 3D maps of (in our case) complex indoor locations such as airports and retail locations. In 2024, I anticipate the demand for MapScale® and other AI-enabled mapping aids will continue to grow as their capabilities do as well.

Category: Industry Predictions

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