What does the future of geospatial technology look like? 🌍
At INTERGEO 2026 in Munich, we sat down with Jack Dangermond, Founder of Esri, to explore his vision for the future of GIS, artificial intelligence and geospatial technology.
From the idea of a planetary nervous system to the convergence of GIS and AI, Dangermond shares his thoughts on how geospatial intelligence can help us better understand our changing world, make informed decisions and work towards a more sustainable future.
🎥 In this interview:
00:00 – Welcome to INTERGEO TV: Jack Dangermond
00:21 – Looking back: From the firs...
What Jack Dangermond said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Jack Dangermond, president and co-founder of Esri, discussed the future of GIS and geospatial intelligence at Intergeo 2026. He described an 'instrumented planet' where everything that moves and changes is monitored and interconnected, enabling a planetary-scale nervous system for real-time understanding and action. He argued that GIS will fuse with AI, creating collective geospatial intelligence that will become the foundation of human action. Reflecting on Esri's history, he credited thousands of people for building a multi-billion-dollar business around the idea that geography is everything. Addressing global uncertainty, he urged young people to pursue GIS, framing it as a field connected to 'everything' and essential for resolving the paradox of civilization's advancement and environmental collapse. He emphasized the need for collaborative geospatial intelligence to enable shared understanding and collaborative action for a sustainable future.
Key takeaways
GIS will fuse with AI to create collective geospatial intelligence, becoming the foundation of human action.
Everything that moves and changes is being monitored, forming an instrumented planet akin to a nervous system.
The geospatial industry has built a 30 to 50 billion dollar business around geographic knowledge.
GIS technology will evolve over the next three to five years to help make better decisions about global collapse.
Young people should jump into GIS because all interests are based on geospatial thinking.
Numbers and commitments
Figure
What it refers to
Type
At
$30 to 50 billion
Size of the geospatial industry built around geographic knowledge
0:20So, and of course right now I have to ask you, looking ahead, what do you see as the most significant development in our industry in the next years?
4:06And what are the milestones in Esri's history you're really proud of?
5:45Which topics, which professions, which skills? Where should they believe it?
Hi, here's Indev from Munich 2026, and right now next to me is Mr. Esri himself. It's Jack Dangermond here for the keynote at Intergeo 2026, and we're really happy that you join us here at Intergeo TV. Thank you very much, Jack.
This is Jack. Jack, while preparing for this episode of Intergeo TV, I was looking into my own history, which I have with Intergeo. So I started in 2011, and in 2010 it was you who held the first keynote, a first visionary keynote, which I found on records. And there you said things like, we will have web-based GIS. You said we will have mobile access. Yeah, that happened. We said we have open data and intelligent maps. So all of these ideas are part of our everyday life and more. So, and of course right now I have to ask you, looking ahead, what do you see as the most significant development in our industry in the next years?
It's a whole keynote. Yeah. One of them is we're learning how to measure virtually everything that moves and changes. I used to call this an instrumented universe or an instrumented planet, and it's, it's happening. So basically everything that moves and changes is now being monitored. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. And it's not only being measured, it's also being served, so made available. So I like to think of it as like a nervous system. You have a nervous system. You see things, you cognate, and then you act. And the same thing is beginning to happen at a planetary scale. We're measuring everything. We're seeing fires. We're seeing in real-time action. And we're able to increasingly, through the eyes of geospatial visualization, maps and so on, understand it and act in a kind of nervous-system-like behavior. So that's exciting to me. And all of those measurements are being interconnected. They're through powerful networks. And on those networks, with those services, people are integrating the different layers of data that are being measured. That, that integration means we can see and understand things because through integration of science, the integration of everything that we, well, everything actually, we can better predict. We can better predict where we should locate something or not locate something. We can predict behavior of humans and animals. You know, everything's becoming known.
7 more exchanges in this transcript
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Dangermond, J. (2026, September 30). The Future of GIS: Jack Dangermond on AI, Innovation & Our Planet | INTERGEO TV [Interview transcript]. INTERGEO TV. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2951215/
MLA
Jack Dangermond. "The Future of GIS: Jack Dangermond on AI, Innovation & Our Planet | INTERGEO TV." INTERGEO TV, 30 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2951215/.
BibTeX
@misc{dangermond2026_2951215,
author = {Jack Dangermond},
title = {The Future of GIS: Jack Dangermond on AI, Innovation \& Our Planet | INTERGEO TV},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, INTERGEO TV. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2951215/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
