GISCafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Rendered AI

By  Chris Andrews, COO, Rendered.ai

Chris Andrews

Looking ahead at the 2023 geospatial industry

The past few years moved us into a new phase of society in which change is the only constant. Geopolitical friction, accelerating climate change, population explosion, and pandemic have had severe impacts on people and planet including displacing the highest number of persons since World War II, straining supply lines for critical food and medical goods, and risking future calamity by putting resources and ecosystems at risk.

Geospatial technology and data cannot cure the issues that confront us, but they are critical tools in knowing, deciding, and communicating our status and pathways toward a more sustainable society.

The major trends that are going to shape GIS and geospatial technology in the marketplace in 2023 and beyond sum up as driven by the increasing importance that we establish digital twins of the built and natural environment around us as tools for monitoring the world and making decisions about commerce, governance, and general social welfare. The data, sensors, and analytics that will be used to create these digital twins will not only be used to train people, but also to train the machines that will increasingly provide first line response to change in the world around us.

Edge and Autonomy

As a commercial company proposing in the late 00’s that the future of construction was complete sensorization of not only the construction equipment but also materials, Autodesk was prescient in their vision of the future of buildings and infrastructure as having eyes and analytics everywhere. Essentially, Autodesk described what we are seeing today, the start of an intelligent edge in which sensors detecting and reporting position, internal status, and surrounding conditions are on the verge of being incorporated into every part of the built environment around us.  Commoditization of technologies such as meta-optics, the reduction in cost and size of machine learning processing chips, and post-pandemic improvement in supply chains will drive manufacturers to begin including edge-based autonomy in the design of everything from pens to poured concrete. While many of these sensor-enabled devices or installations may seem trivial or inconsequential, as systems of integrated sensors, they will enable the autonomy of everything from the movement of cargo to activity around wildfire response.

AI everywhere

Whether in 3D reconstruction with NeRFs, rapid edge processing of computer vision data, design and evaluation of scenarios of traffic and information flow, or in efficiencies made possible through Conversational AI tools such as ChatGPT, AI is poised to become even more pervasive throughout society. In 2023, we’re going to see the results of the rapid rise of Generative AI and Conversational AI that occurred in 2022 and these will be applied to concepts such as simulating synthetic computer vision imagery to train AI and translating written descriptions of scenarios into actual 3D scenes used for training and investigation. With the increased access to embedded sensor technologies, more geospatial startups will investigate using AI to derive and analyze micro-activities in society, potentially leading to continued divergence in geospatial standards and data types.

Security and Climate Change

2022 brought more evidence that global security and our collective ability to absorb, respond to, and mitigate the effects of climate change will continue to be major drivers for funding of geospatial technologies and data collection. Even if there are commercial slowdowns in construction activity in a global recession, essential funds will still be required to maintain international stability and enable planning and dynamic response to changing supply lines for everything from medical supplies to microchips.  In 2023, GIS, including traditional digital mapping experiences and skills, will continue to be deployed to help manage the human impacts of global change. Additional funding and research will be applied to processing the growing availability of data for purposes of improving prediction and response to crises and events.

Data availability

With edge sensing and ongoing investment in remote Earth observation driving exponential increases in data collection in the next few years, it’s hard to conceive of the opportunities and challenges of creating value from thousands of times as much data as we have available today. When considering that most edge and remote sensing data is pixels and other unstructured computer vision content, the need to process imagery and 3D data in 2023 is going accelerate democratization of GIS analysis and AI-based processing of sensor data beyond the capacity of most vendors and organizations in the industry. This market urgency will drive the creation of more open-source tools and techniques by previously non-geospatial groups and may also cause further fragmentation of standards. In 2023, with more funding going into smaller teams and niche product efforts focused on new data sources, we will likely see the proliferation of embedded spatial inside devices and processes which won’t appear to be GIS at all.

About Author:

Chris is COO and Head of Product at Rendered.ai, helping customers overcome the costs and limitations of using real-world data to train AI and ML systems. Chris previously led a team at Esri responsible for 3D, Defense, Urban Planning, and AEC products. Prior to Esri, Chris was the lead product manager for Autodesk’s InfraWorks.

Category: GIS Industry Predictios

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2023 at 11:22 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.