15 May The Rise Of AI Meets The Golden Age Of Geography
Organizations worldwide are harnessing the power of spatial analysis – a time-tested technology – with AI to elevate their analytical and predictive capabilities and accelerate actionable insights.
Case in point: 40% of goods produced in the US are distributed via waterways. To keep these goods moving, water must be deep enough. The US Army Corps of Engineers, one of the world’s largest and most diverse engineering organizations, must monitor 25,000 miles of waterways and 400 ports. They’ve used a combination of spatial analysis and AI – and have saved $100 million a year. How? By improving the ability to predict decreasing water depth, the Corps deploys dredging equipment more efficiently and maintains the movement of goods. That’s the transformative power of pairing spatial analysis with AI, or what is known as GeoAI.
Spatial analysis relies on geographic information system (GIS) technology to analyze data for insights and decision-making. GIS technology lets us map the operations of our businesses and cities in all-new ways. GeoAI takes all the power of cutting-edge GIS and enriches it exponentially, adding the ability for greater prediction, automation, and precision. The pairing of spatial analysis and AI enables organizations to ask and answer key questions at a speed and scale that humans alone could never achieve. It’s not magic — it’s automation. It lets people make more effective decisions both in real-time and for the longer-term.
The fusion of AI and spatial analysis results in three powerful capabilities that seamlessly leverage the benefits of both technologies:
o Automate tasks and repeat them quickly at scale. GeoAI can streamline and optimize a range of business processes including operations, asset management, and supply chain monitoring.
o Look at past patterns to make predictions. GeoAI can identify patterns, such as escalating risks, and generate recommendations or decisions based on predefined criteria or objectives.
o Search for patterns hidden in large amounts of data. GeoAI can search and cross-reference troves of data for insights related to customer demographics, economics, and geography.
AI is following a familiar pattern in technology
it is becoming so advanced, so sophisticated that it can be made easier to use as a routine analytical tool rather than harder. That changes not just the power of the computing and the geographic systems, it changes the power of organizations and their people. Increasingly, decision-makers are using the combination of AI and spatial analysis on complex problems that involve big datasets that may be difficult otherwise for humans to discern. For instance, companies and cities can use AI and spatial analysis to analyze energy usage patterns in buildings and identify opportunities to reduce energy consumption. This helps organizations reduce costs and realize sustainability goals.
GeoAI excels at image recognition to tease out answers to complex and high-value questions. With the explosion of imagery coming from satellites, drones, and aircraft – coupled with the urgency to make sense of rapid changes – AI and spatial analysis answer the need by swiftly sifting through every pixel to find answers to not only where but also where now.
With AI and spatial analytics, decision-makers and organizations can tackle high-priority questions and get faster, better answers: Where are our best customers and locations and where are they likely to be in the future?, Where are the critical resources my company relies on and how can we operate in those places with the least impact on the environment and threatened species? , Where are my assets or operational locations in danger from rising seas, extreme heat, or other climate risks? Already GeoAI is a powerful means of synthesizing location intelligence that enables decision-makers to prioritize what needs to happen where:
- A transportation organization in Europe uses GeoAI to process indicators of road conditions on critical highways. Using the data and analysis, decision-makers can determine when specific road sections will need repairs. The task of combing through reams of data, which would take analysts hundreds of hours to pore through, can now be done swiftly and automatically as part of ongoing workflows.
- Leaders at a well-known global logistics company wanted to explore ways to wring more efficiency out of their operation. The decision-makers who oversee their flights wondered if there was a way to predict when a plane would need parts or maintenance. GeoAI has helped the company achieve this efficiency. The company’s VP of airline technology termed it “almost the holy grail for a maintenance operation.”
- A forward-looking U.S. utility company used GeoAI to conduct a conditions assessment that helped it pinpoint the water mains most in need of replacement. The GeoAI-powered model ranked each water main segment by the likelihood of failure, as well as the consequences of that failure. Factors that the system analyzes included pipe data, weather, soil type, seismic activity, and traffic – all of which revealed the assets most at risk. GeoAI also established the assets that had remaining useful life, which helped the utility avoid replacing healthy assets prematurely. With knowledge of likelihood of failure and the potential for consequences, the utility made the most of its asset maintenance budget.
GeoAI takes business agility
to a whole new level — and adds in the ability to do almost instantaneous analysis, and then to change the questions and assumptions and run the analysis again, just as quickly. The result is a transformational tool with wide-ranging value in everything from planning how to optimize a supply chain to deciding how best to optimize resources to assessing implications of policy changes and market trends.
Modern GIS technology gives leaders in business and government the ability to see the present in incredible detail; GeoAI gives them the ability to look beyond the horizon, to predict the future — and to make decisions about the future better, and quicker. It unlocks the ability to ask a new dimension of questions and get the answers.
At a moment when our problems seem to be increasing in complexity, GeoAI is the tool to meet that moment. It doesn’t cut through or minimize the complexity — it lets us take the complexity into account.
Unleashing GIS Technology’s potential in every industries