A deeper understanding of the world to design a better future

In 1969, Jack and Laura Dangermond launched Esri with a bold idea: geographic tools could help people understand – and actively shape – a better world. Such tools now underpin billions of maps created each day, supporting fields ranging from urban planning to environmental management. In this interview, Jack Dangermond reflects on Esri’s journey – from early custom projects to today’s AI- and cloud-based innovations – and shares his perspectives on the current and future geospatial industry. How did the specialized concept of geographic science evolve into a global essential? Why does he describe GIS as “the nervous system of the planet”? And how has the relationship between humans and maps evolved over time?

Does your original vision when founding Esri still stand today?

When we founded Esri in 1969, the idea was to create what we called ‘environmental systems’, or what I would now describe as ‘geographic systems’. The original vision was that a mapping and analysis framework could help people understand the world more deeply and ultimately help design a better future. Initially, we wanted Esri to be a research institute – a nonprofit – but that didn’t work financially. As youngsters, we simply couldn’t secure grants for something that bold. So after a couple of years, we switched to a normal company model: sell a vision, do the work, get paid, sell another vision, do the work, get paid, and so on.

For most of our first decade, we mainly did project work. We applied computer mapping tools and spatial analysis to real projects. Looking back, that was unfortunate in one way, because we didn’t yet have the idea of building a software product. We built software around projects, and many of our customers didn’t even realize they were receiving software. They just saw the results, appreciated those results and moved on. But after eight or nine years, something changed. People began asking whether they could get our software themselves. Up to that point, we had provided our tools as open-source software. One example was the Polygon Information Overlay System, a system we called PIOS. We had built a collection of tools for one customer, and they used it on their mainframes while we used our own mainframe here. Over that first decade, we accumulated quite a few customers who wanted to use the software directly.

Around that time, a group of about 11 of them gathered in a building here in Redlands and urged us to take what would today be called ‘homemade software’ and turn it into a real product. That was difficult because we were so focused on doing the project work. And the projects themselves were really fascinating – we built a whole GIS for the State of Maryland that was used to build their land-use plan, we did forestry studies for the US Forest Service, we collected data, produced maps, performed analytics, and helped people make decisions, like where to locate a power plant or a transmission line. We contributed to building an atlas of cancer patterns in the USA, helped companies pick retail sites, or assisted housing developers with environmental assessments that would guide more sustainable land-use planning. It was all incredibly energizing.

With so much project work happening, how did Esri then make the shift from custom projects to creating a true GIS product?

It really came from our users. By the end of those first ten years, customers were increasingly anxious to do the work themselves. We had pioneered many of these methods, but we weren’t the only ones thinking this way. People like Ian McHarg, the famous landscape planner, were doing similar things using plastic overlays. And many of my professors at Harvard, like Carl Steinitz, were articulating the conceptual foundations of geographic overlays. So in some sense, we were running in parallel – they were doing it in non-digital ways, while we were doing it with digital tools.

But the idea caught on. And I was very fortunate around that time, in 1981, to be joined by a very talented software engineer, Scott Morehouse. He worked with our developer team to create the first principles-based GIS. Meanwhile, Roger Tomlinson – widely considered the inventor of the term ‘GIS’ – was consulting with forestry agencies around the world. They would run benchmark tests, comparing our software with other emerging tools. We took those benchmarks seriously and used the competitive pressure to build a better, more rigorous GIS.

That was the beginning of GIS becoming a system, something that could grow into a platform for building other systems. People wanted to manage their forests better, manage their cities better, manage land and infrastructure in a more analytical way. At that time, consultants and users began writing RFPs, and we had to demonstrate our capabilities in formal competitions. We competed against billion-dollar firms like IBM, Intergraph and others who focused on automated mapping using CAD tools. And we were able to win because we were introducing a new generation of technology built on the concepts of GIS rather than automated mapping.

So to come back to your first question, the original vision absolutely still stands. In fact, it has only deepened. We started with the idea that geographic tools could help people make better decisions. That core idea has guided everything. Whatever the application, the principle’s always the same: bring data together geographically, visualize it, analyse it and use it to make better choices. Over time, that vision evolved into something even larger: the recognition that GIS could become not just a set of tools but a platform – a system for managing and integrating the knowledge needed to understand our world. Today, with interconnected services, cloud infrastructure, sensors, AI and billions of maps being made every day, that original vision is more alive than ever: we are still trying to build tools that help people understand the world and design a better future.

The geospatial landscape has shifted dramatically over the years. How does Esri remain a market leader?

Esri’s position has been shaped by a few consistent principles. As a private organization, we are not driven by public markets or short-term financial pressure. That gives us the freedom to focus on serving our users first. Our engineering direction is guided by that mindset, and it stays current because thousands of engineers around the world are constantly asking a simple question: what do our users actually need, and how can we translate those needs into innovation? Another factor is our long-standing focus on technology transitions. We have lived through each major shift, from mainframes to minicomputers, then workstations, desktops, client-server architectures, and now cloud and mobile environments. At every stage, we have continued to reinvest a significant share of our revenue into research and development. Today, our labs span the globe, with teams in places such as Zurich, Edinburgh, Spain, Turkey, Australia and India, all working at the edge of reality capture, digital twins, artificial intelligence and machine learning. That breadth of effort reflects a long-term commitment rather than a short-term product cycle.

Since the 1980s, our core philosophy has been to build a library of high-performance tools based on first principles, designed so others can adapt and extend them. That approach continues today across ArcGIS Pro on the desktop, ArcGIS Enterprise within organizations, and ArcGIS Online, where millions of users now create four to five billion maps every day. Adoption continues to grow at 35% annually.

Billions of maps a day? That’s mind-blowing…

The way people use and work with maps is fascinating, diverse, and reflects an evolution of geography itself. I am not a scholar in the evolution of civilization, but I find books such as Sapiens and Nexus particularly interesting because they cover some 50,000 years of history. When we go back 4,000 to 5,000 years, we see that maps already played a role. One of the best surviving examples is found in western France, where a large, two-metre clay tablet was discovered. It lays out roads, small villages and cadastral buildings. When modern digital maps are overlaid on it, the accuracy is striking.

Fast-forward to the mosaic map of Jerusalem in a church in Jordan, then to early collections of cartography, such as those preserved by the Catholic Church at the Observatory in Rome. After that came the development of instruments – Galileo’s transformational tools, telescopes and compasses. Space, geography and maps have always played a role in the evolution of civilization. Today’s industry professionals should be proud of that legacy, because their work – the practical application of digital instruments, cartography and analytics – is now evolving at an enormously rapid rate. GIS is helping to expand the role of geography, spatial thinking and mapping – not least thanks to our customers, who are embedding components of our platform everywhere, including directly into field devices.

We’re witnessing the rise of AI. How do GIS and AI relate to each other currently, and what can we expect?

I’ve spent a lot of time with executives from large IT companies and even they have no idea how technology will change in ten years’ time. It’s exhilarating, but foolish to speculate too far. What we’re seeing now are developments in four main areas: feature extraction, AI assistants, agent-based systems, and large language models around geospatial data. In terms of feature extraction, we have embedded into our software roughly 90 image-based models that users can access freely. These models leverage computer vision and AI to extract features from imagery, and people adapt them to their own local data to create building maps, parking maps, flood maps and other thematic products from different types of imagery. That approach has become quite common across the geospatial community. For observation and interpretation, we apply GeoAI to pull out features, update maps and refresh datasets. That capability is now accelerating into the mobile environment. Models are being embedded directly into tools such as ArcGIS Field Maps and Survey123, enabling people to recognize features from photos and automatically populate forms or capture stories about a location. In many cases, this significantly speeds up data collection. Behind all of this are traditional geoprocessing tools that automate measurements and connect them directly to GIS databases as transactions. Much like scanning a barcode, you can update a city’s vegetation inventory or a utility company’s asset condition data almost instantly.

‘Assistants’ are built-in helpers that sit alongside the software and help GIS professionals do their work better. We now have assistants across virtually all of our software, similar to what companies such as Microsoft or Salesforce are doing. These systems don’t replace GIS professionals; they help them work faster, automate routine tasks, navigate complex tools and think problems through more efficiently. Given the volume of documentation involved, that kind of support makes a real difference. We are also applying these assistants to programming. Many users rely on Arcade, our web-based scripting language, to automate their workflows. We are now introducing assisted scripting for Arcade, and the same approach is being applied to Python. Users can generate a working script automatically and then edit it as needed.

It is still very early days for what people are calling ‘agents’ or ‘agent-based systems’ and we don’t yet have fully productized examples, but we are building agents for specific customers, such as weather-forecasting agents. Standards are emerging that allow these agents to talk to one another, as well as to people. It’s hard to say exactly how this will evolve, but I do think agents – working alongside assistive tools – could become foundational for the next generation of geospatial applications. We already think in terms of layers – data, tools, applications built through scripting, and potentially an agent layer on top of that – and natural language could be used to interact with it. So it is worth keeping an eye on the developments around an agent-based geospatial ecosystem. Lastly, some cloud providers are experimenting with large language models around geospatial data. It’s still very expensive and there is no strong evidence that it is going to be very valuable, but something may come of it.

The great dilemma today is our lack of understanding and our inability to collaborate – that’s the fundamental thing! Geography and mapping are the languages of understanding, and understanding precedes action. What we’re doing as a community, millions of people worldwide, is building the foundation for better understanding. And AI will build on that foundation, using the language of maps to facilitate collaboration and to address these challenges.

The ‘E’ in Esri stands for ‘environmental’. How can GIS help us address today’s challenges related to climate, natural disasters and environmental preservation?

I think some climate and biodiversity challenges are being politicized. That’s unfortunate, because climate change is not a myth or a political statement – evidence shows it’s actually happening. The real question is what humans should do about it.

GIS is built on geography, the science of our world, and geography integrates many other sciences: geology, climatology, health science, economics. It’s an abstraction of our world in digital form. What isn’t geographic? In fact, my new word for geography is ‘everything’.

So geospatial players in the GIS world – drawing on data from almost every other discipline – are increasingly involved in planning, designing and managing the fundamental infrastructure of modern society. It is hard to think of anything of real significance today that isn’t, in some way, managed using GIS, maps, geographic knowledge or imagery. While most GIS users are working in their own organizations – from water companies to planning agencies or other businesses – all the data layers can be brought together into a network of interconnected, distributed services and called upon as a kind of nervous system of the planet. And that information and geospatial infrastructure has a real role to play in the next step of the planet’s evolution. Because the emergence of this nervous system of the planet is real, and it’s going to continue. Edge devices, computing at the edge, AI built into sensors, and large enterprise GIS systems are all coming together with applications that can be used by everyone. That’s why the theme of the Esri User Conference 2025 was ‘GIS integrating everything, everywhere, for everyone’.

This rapidly emerging infrastructure, with billions of maps being made every day, is guiding national security, policing, infrastructure, investment, forest management, protected areas, shipping, transportation – everything. As it becomes smarter, humans will become more knowledgeable. There will be more geospatial intelligence, which will lead to better outcomes – including for the environment.

What’s your view on professional associations like FIG, ISPRS, OGC and UN-GGIM?

I believe deeply in the value of professional associations because they create spaces where people can connect with each other’s work and ideas. They act as facilitators – places where people can communicate openly and safely. Personal relationships matter. They shape your thinking and help you understand whose shoulders you’re standing on. In my own life, my father was one of those people, but many of the others who influenced me most were professionals I’d met at conferences who showed empathy for a young kid starting out. They offered advice, shared knowledge and became mentors and even friends. Those kinds of relationships fuel idea creation, knowledge exchange, confidence building and collective understanding of what is happening in the world.

Virtual interaction can never fully replace that. During COVID, many believed virtual conferences would become the new norm, but they didn’t stick. There’s an intimacy and bond that develops when people are physically together – whether it’s over a cup of coffee or simply through being in the same room – that technology can’t replicate. That’s why professional societies and the meetings they organize remain so important. They create the relationships that enable mentoring, collaboration and the ideation and acceptance of new ideas. And mentoring is essential for creating the future!

When it comes to making the world a better place, how important is accurate parcel mapping for national economies, and how can GIS help governments develop affordable cadastral systems?

It’s my strong opinion that cadastral systems are the foundation for civil society. Countries with strong cadastres tend to be more successful – more stable, self-sustaining through taxation, better governed through administrative dimensions. We see the opposite in developing countries where the lack of a cadastral system leads to informal economies and corruption. Many efforts by countries in the Global North to export their technologies to the Global South have failed because they couldn’t afford the high-accuracy systems or didn’t have applications requiring them.

About five to seven years ago, we began developing a new parcel fabric. This is a data model designed to bring surveying and land boundaries together within a single system. Led by Chief Architect Amir Bar-Maor in the Netherlands, the team built this model and its supporting software directly inside ArcGIS. It works for both large and small cadastral systems and has already been adopted by land agencies in Switzerland and Sweden, as well as by local governments in Canada, with around 400 implementations to date. We are now introducing a new ArcGIS Online capability that has the potential to change how cadastral systems are delivered, particularly in developing countries.

Conventional cadastral systems often struggle in developing contexts because they depend on office-based infrastructure, climate-controlled environments, IT specialists and expensive software. Our web-based editor removes many of those barriers. It allows users to capture parcel data in the field using approximate GPS or high-performance GNSS, store that data in the cloud, scan and load existing parcel records, edit boundaries and generate maps and standard tax documentation – all within a single environment. Moreover, ArcGIS Online operates as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment, meaning users do not need to invest hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars upfront in hardware or local installations. They simply subscribe, with access to editing and mapping tools at different price levels.

This approach supports fit-for-purpose land administration: walking parcel boundaries, approximating limits in collaboration with neighbours, and plotting parcels directly against imagery. It is not about replacing high-precision surveying where that is required, but about enabling practical, affordable cadastral systems that match local needs and capacities. Rather than relying on large, centrally funded or donor-driven projects, communities can start small – often at the neighbourhood level – and grow at their own pace. Modern measurement systems can still be integrated where available. This bottom-up approach allows cadastral modernization to expand organically over time.

With many now adopting open-source solutions, how do you see Esri’s role evolving, and what opportunities do you see for collaboration with the open-source community?

Our history with open source began long ago, but our users ultimately encouraged us to productize our tools so they could be supported without requiring software engineers on staff. At the same time, we’ve worked hard to ensure those tools remain open and interoperable, with open architectures, open APIs, open services and open standards. That openness is essential for building the system of systems that will be needed for the next stage of how we manage and understand our world.

We don’t dislike the open-source community at all. In fact, we have many collaborations where our tools work with open-source tools, both in the geospatial world and beyond. As I’m sure you know, we support and appreciate the OGC consortium, for instance. We embed things like GDAL into our platform, which has benefited us, and we share and integrate with the R community – the open-source statistics and data-science platform.

While there are areas of overlap and in some cases competition with our tools, generally we would assert that we can provide customers with more business value for their investment – even small ones – by giving them a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf, Ed.) platform.

Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers in the geospatial community?

One thing I reflect on from time to time is that the geospatial community is essential for our future. I hope GIM International readers will take to heart that they are doing important work, and how they do it matters. That means building the right data, the right systems and the right maps, applying the latest science and technology, and bringing together our best information, our best thinking and our most creative design ideas. Geospatial knowledge is evolving rapidly, and its importance is only increasing. But I also want to emphasize that our future requires more than technology alone. It requires community. This goes back to the professional meetings and collaborations in organizations such as ISPRS, ASPRS and the OGC. Technology is critical, but it’s the people who make progress happen. I truly believe the geospatial community will play a vital role in shaping what comes next in the world. At its core, this work is about creating a culture of sharing, collaboration and integrated thinking – something that geography and geospatial information are uniquely able to support. By bringing data and powerful technology together, we can transform how we understand the world, how we work together and how we solve problems more holistically to build a better future.

Looking back, I think I intuitively sensed this potential even as a kid. My whole life has been about trying to advance the technical innovation needed to realize it. And what I’m seeing now is that everything is finally coming together. With web services and interconnected systems, geospatial technology is becoming a truly powerful platform for understanding and guiding the evolution of the planet. But above all, this isn’t about me. It’s about all the people in this ecosystem – GIM International readers, our users, practitioners everywhere – who are making it real. It’s not one vendor or one agency. It’s a system of systems. And that system of systems needs support through collaborative, open and interoperable technology.