The World Geospatial Industry Council (WGIC) welcomed members, partners, and industry leaders to Horizons 2026 in London on June 2, 2026, for a focused day of conversations on the growing role of geospatial as critical digital infrastructure.
The event brought together leadership voices from technology, infrastructure, climate, law, academia, energy, and public service. Across the day, one message resonated through clearly: geospatial is no longer a supporting capability hidden behind maps, platforms, and specialist workflows. It is a strategic layer that underpins decisions about infrastructure, resilience, climate risk, mobility, energy systems, AI, and public trust.
Right from the opening remarks, Horizons 2026 set the tone for a broader conversation. The discussions were not only about tools, models, or platforms. They were about systems, accountability, interoperability, and the role of the geospatial industry in shaping technologies that are increasingly embedded in daily life and national decision-making. The event was supported by Lead Sponsor Esri, Co-Sponsors Hexagon, TomTom, and Trimble, Breakfast Sponsor Sparkgeo, Luncheon Host Bentley Systems, and Cocktail Reception Host CHC Navigation.
Geography Still Matters in the Age of AI
The opening keynote by Ed Parsons, Digital Geographer and Chair of the Board of Directors at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and former Geospatial Technologist at Google, demonstrated how geography is at the heart of the AI conversation.
As AI changes how data is collected, processed, and used, geography remains the framework that helps people understand why things happen where they happen. The conversation moved beyond geospatial as a way to describe the world and focused instead on its value in explaining the world.
This distinction became one of the key signals of the day. AI can help automate analyses, detect change, and process information at new speed and scale. But without geographic thinking, domain expertise, and human judgment, those outputs risk becoming disconnected from context. The challenge for the geospatial industry is not only to build better models, but to make sure those models remain grounded in place, purpose, and accountability.
The keynote also explored the rise of world models, decision layers, embedded machine learning, and AI-enabled interfaces. These developments point toward a future where geospatial professionals may need to move closer to the end user, helping design decision systems rather than only producing data or maps.
Trust is Becoming Core Infrastructure
Denise McKenzie, Managing Partner at PLACE Trust, brought the conversation directly to public trust, consent, and accountability.
As location data becomes part of finance, mobility, climate action, health, insurance, security, and digital services, trust is no longer a soft value. It is becoming part of the infrastructure that allows geospatial systems to operate. Citizens are increasingly visible through location-enabled services, but they often have limited understanding of who uses their data, how it is combined, or what decisions it may influence.
The session highlighted the trust gap created by rapid technological change, especially as AI expands what can be inferred from spatial data. It also explored new governance models, including data trusts, data commons, federated governance, and community stewardship.
For WGIC, its member companies, and the wider commercial geospatial industry, this raises an important responsibility. The products and services that will succeed over time are likely to be those that can explain how they work, demonstrate value to communities, protect sensitive data, and show long-term stewardship.
Infrastructure is Learning Through Geospatial Intelligence
Vijay Sharma, Global Chief Commercial Officer for Sustainability and Infrastructure at Deloitte, connected geospatial directly to urban resilience and infrastructure transformation.
His session showed how AI, digital twins, sensors, predictive maintenance, and spatial analytics are changing how infrastructure is planned, operated, and maintained. From transport networks and flood warning systems to energy grids and city-scale digital twins, geospatial is becoming a foundation for infrastructure that can learn from its environment.
A recurring theme was that much of the existing infrastructure was built before the digital era. That creates a major challenge, but also a major opportunity. If infrastructure planning, construction, and operations are connected through geospatial data and digital twins, governments and businesses can reduce inefficiency, improve resilience, and make better decisions with limited resources.
The executive fireside chat that followed, moderated by Matthew Pennells of Esri, returned to a practical question: how does the geospatial industry make sure geography remains at the center as automation accelerates?
The answer was not to talk more about technology for its own sake. It was to explain outcomes better, speak the language of decision-makers, and position geospatial professionals as problem solvers who can connect data, AI, policy, and real-world impact.
From Maps to Reasoning Systems
Geeth De Mel, Manager, Climate and Sustainability and Senior Research Scientist at IBM, explored the shift from maps and analytics toward reasoning systems for the physical world. The session showed how AI models are moving from simple detection and classification toward systems that can support prediction, uncertainty assessment, and decision workflows.
This is especially important in climate, disaster response, biodiversity, land use, and infrastructure planning. These are dynamic systems where historic data alone is not enough. The physical world changes, and AI systems need to account for uncertainty, causality, and physical constraints.
The discussion highlighted a key challenge for adoption: organizations do not only need accurate outputs. They need repeatable, explainable, and trustworthy workflows. For geospatial AI to be used in high-stakes decisions, users need to understand where the data came from, how models produced results, and how much confidence they should place in those results.
Energy Infrastructure Depends on Location Intelligence
Ryan Ciesielski, Global Head of Geospatial at National Grid, offered a practical look at geospatial intelligence in critical energy infrastructure.
His session showed how location data supports planning, operations, maintenance, resilience, and investment across large-scale energy networks. National Grid’s geospatial work spans asset management, underground infrastructure, digital twins, vegetation management, drones, subsea cable risk, climate risk, and distributed energy resources.
Geospatial capability gains executive attention when it is connected to customer impact, outage reduction, operational efficiency, regulatory needs, and infrastructure investment.
The session also reinforced the need for community, capability building, and internal alignment. For large, federated organizations, geospatial maturity is not only a technical project. It requires people, governance, shared models, and a clear place in enterprise strategy.
WGIC Partnerships
to Foster
Geospatial Leaders
During the lunch session, WGIC announced its support for the launch of the Executive Doctor of Geospatial Leadership (DGEO) program, offered by Clark University and the University of Southern California.
The DGEO program marks an important step in addressing the leadership and workforce needs of the geospatial industry. Designed for mid-career professionals, the program will combine geospatial technology, GeoAI, strategic leadership, management, finance, marketing, and applied capstone work.
The announcement reflected one of the broader themes of Horizons 2026: as geospatial becomes critical digital infrastructure, the industry needs leaders who can move confidently between technical, business, policy, and societal priorities.
The initiative reflects WGIC’s ongoing commitment to geospatial workforce development. Accordingly, WGIC invites its member organizations to help establish the DGEO programs, participate in the doctoral capstone and classroom experience to bring real-world practices to the curriculum, and drive recognition and demand for the degree worldwide.
Why Geospatial Fails and How to Fix it
Vida Williams, Geospatial Capability Lead at Jacobs and Director at the Association for Geographic Information (AGI- UK), addressed a topic that is often avoided: why geospatial fails.
Her session focused on three areas: data, people, and integration. Organizations may have powerful tools, talented teams, and large volumes of data, but geospatial value is lost when data is fragmented, systems are disconnected, governance is weak, and insights do not reach decision-making workflows.
The message was clear: AI will not automatically solve these issues. In fact, it may amplify them if organizations do not build strong data cultures, standardize processes, improve literacy, and embed geospatial into operational decisions.
Vida shared examples to demonstrate how the integration works. Governed, auditable, and connected geospatial workflows can reduce manual effort, improve compliance, support live decisions, and shift organizations from reporting problems to preventing them.
AI, Satellites, and Legal Accountability
Phil Cooper of Amazon Web Services (AWS) examined how generative AI is reshaping the downstream commercial and institutional satellite market. The session focused on the move from petabytes of Earth observation data to decisions delivered at speed.
As satellite data volumes grow, the opportunity is no longer only in collecting more data. It is in making data accessible, searchable, usable, and connected to real decisions. Generative AI is changing how users interact with geospatial and Earth observation information, opening new possibilities for faster analyses, automation, and wider adoption. “For years, we competed on the resolutions — 50 cm, 30 cm, 5 cm. But today, decision-makers ask: give me an answer, and give it to me quickly,” Phil concluded.
Kevin Pomfret, Partner at Pierson Ferdinand LLP, then explored the evolving legal landscape of AI and its impact on geospatial. As AI becomes part of automated feature extraction, predictive analytics, data fusion, and decision support, questions around liability, intellectual property, privacy, data rights, and regulation become more urgent.
The following fireside chat, moderated by Marius Swanepoel of TomTom, connected these threads. Technology, trust, governance, and accountability cannot be treated separately. As geospatial platforms scale through cloud infrastructure and AI, the industry must be ready to explain not only what systems can do, but how they are governed.
Climate Service and National Decision-making
The Met Office keynote by Alex Woods brought climate services into focus, showing how the UK’s national weather and climate service is helping turn climate science into practical intelligence for local authorities, infrastructure planners, businesses, and communities. Through the Local Authority Climate Service and the UK Climate Intelligence program, the session highlighted the need to make climate risk information easier to access, understand, and apply in decisions about places, infrastructure, and long-term resilience.
This theme connected strongly with earlier discussions on trust, reasoning systems, and critical infrastructure. Climate risk is deeply spatial. To support adaptation and resilience, decision-makers need data that is not only authentic, but also accessible, understandable, and directly relevant to local action.
Geospatial in the Digital Infrastructure Era
The final fireside chat, moderated by WGIC President Zubran Solaiman, brought together Will Cadell of Sparkgeo, James Whitworth of Hexagon, and Rachel Tidmarsh of Bluesky, a Woolpert company.
The conversation explored the major shifts shaping the sector, from spatial data as national infrastructure to AI-enabled platforms and digital twins of cities and infrastructure. It reflected the central message of the day: geospatial is moving into a new position of importance, but that position comes with responsibility.
The closing reflections by Aaron Addison and Marius Swanepoel reflected on the role of WGIC as a convening platform. The event created space for commercial geospatial companies, partners, users, and decision-makers to examine where the industry is heading and how it can shape that direction together.
Horizons 2026 showed that the future of geospatial will not be defined by technology alone. It will be shaped by how well the industry explains its value, earns trust, builds responsible systems, and works across sectors to solve real problems.
