Challenging old ways opens doors for geospatial innovation

Against the backdrop of a geospatial talent shortage and budget cuts in adjacent industries, the focus of Hexagon’s Geosystems division for the coming years is to make it even easier for geospatial professionals to deploy technology to improve their efficiency. In this exclusive interview, Henning Sandfort, the division’s new president, discusses the importance of leveraging ‘big’ geospatial data to create value and drive growth, supported by technologies such as the cloud, AI and autonomous systems. “Customers’ readiness to challenge established practices and rethink how they do business opens up significant opportunities, not just for us at Hexagon, but for the industry as a whole,” he says.

Congratulations on your new role at Hexagon. What are you most looking forward to in your new position?

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been fascinated by infrastructure and technology that helps the world turn, which led me to study engineering. Today, I love the fact that our customers are the hidden champions supporting everyday life. By enabling them to measure and make sense of the geospatial environment with our hardware and software products, we empower surveyors and many other types of professionals to ensure that buildings, tunnels, bridges, water dams and the like are constructed and operated safely. What I find particularly fascinating is that we are part of a continuous evolution – from cartographers working with the first maps in ancient times, to today’s surveyors using drones, artificial intelligence and other high-tech equipment to get the job done efficiently. As an engineer, the incredible accuracy and precision we’re now able to achieve sometimes astonishes me.

In terms of my new role, I’m very passionate about building and scaling up companies based on technology. I see clear potential here for growing the business based on our global team’s strong technological and application-related knowhow on the one hand, and the market opportunities on the other. Another thing I’m looking forward to is ‘unlearning’ much of what I learned at my previous company so that I can live and breathe a new company culture and embrace a new and exciting way of doing things.

How will the experience gained in your previous role at Siemens Smart Infrastructure help you in your new position?

The valuable experience I gained in the B2B (business-to-business, Ed.) technology-based business spanning a combination of hardware and software will for sure support me effectively in my role at Hexagon. We’ve all faced quite significant challenges, starting with Covid and then the supply chain crisis, inflation and geopolitical tensions. In such times, you need to chart a course for the business, drive engagement in the organization, and ensure you really understand how you can add value for your customers – how you can make a difference out there.

What will be the main focus of Hexagon’s Geosystems division for the coming years?

The foundation of any successful business is to be close to your customers and markets. Besides our broad coverage when it comes to sales, we also have a strong service organization. This helps us to not only support our customers, but also to continuously learn from how they actually work. It’s about listening. I believe the next big step in value creation – not only for us, but also for the industry as a whole – will be in total cost of ownership and understanding how to improve the day-to-day workflows of our end customers. This ties in with the topic of big geospatial data. With so much data out there, the question is, how do you leverage it? How do you make it work for you? Our continuous learning approach and interaction with our customers and end users will help us to shape that successfully.

In the geospatial industry, success often comes down to equipping teams with the right tools. How do you see Hexagon’s role in creating the right ecosystem that best supports service providers and other companies?

The foundation of Hexagon’s market position, which we’ve built over the decades that we have been in business, is to continuously help our customers to innovate. We do that by providing solutions that leverage the latest technology tailored to their specific application areas. Ultimately, the goal is to put technology to work to drive productivity, so you can do more with less. The geospatial sector is facing a talent shortage and an environment of budget cuts, so we need to ensure that we are making it easy for people to use and deploy new technology to improve efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. This is quite a challenge, because today’s technology has so many opportunities and potential that you need to really understand the application well to achieve this.

Another key aspect of our business is service and life cycle support. What matters to our customers is the long-term performance of the equipment they use to map and monitor buildings and infrastructure. Therefore, service will continue to be an important way of contributing to our customers’ business – and not only related to hardware, but also in terms of software-based services. Lastly, in today’s world, innovation is not only about incorporating and adopting new technology, but also being able to easily interface it with other systems, other software or other workflows. So interoperability is another aspect of creating the right ecosystem to support our customers’ operations.

There is a lot of buzz around AI. What is your view on its potential for delivering significant benefits for geospatial professionals?

Together with cloud computing, edge computing and other advanced technologies, artificial intelligence will for sure have a fundamental impact in many ways. AI helps our customers expand the services and applications they can offer. For B2B companies like us, it’s also about applying AI models to further improve how we operate, innovate and provide value to our customers.

But to deploy AI in a productive way, you need a deep understanding of the application. Hexagon’s Geosystems division started working on this quite a few years ago. A new version of the point cloud classification engine in Leica Cyclone 3DR provides 20% faster performance compared to the previous update, helping accelerate the creation of models and object identification. This is just one example of how we can make technology matter in our customers’ day-to-day work.

Looking ahead, I foresee that technology – from the cloud to AI – will bring many more changes: how companies work together, how they partner with customers, and how they engage with customers over the life cycle. I think we’ve only seen a small fraction of what it can do for us.

Let’s turn our attention to the construction industry, which a few years ago was seen as lagging behind in terms of digitalization. How would you describe the current state of the industry today?

Construction remains plagued by inefficiencies, and we know that overarching productivity gains in this sector have lagged behind those in other industries for decades – including the slower pace of digital transformation. Deploying digitalization at scale is inherently more difficult in construction than in other industries because of complex value chains and stakeholder ecosystems. For instance, it has very strict regulations and industry-specific protocols, plus a wide array of stakeholders who also differ across countries to some extent. While the broad and fragmented nature of the sector has inevitably meant the slower advancement of digitalization, I think there has definitely been progress in the past decade, and it’s clearly on the agenda of many of our customers and also of my former customers in the building industry.

Even so, many industry players are still sitting on a lot of unused operational data, locked away in isolated systems. So the key question is, how do you break down those barriers and bridge the domain silos so that everyone can benefit from one another’s data? That’s where adding contextual information – such as scan data – plays a crucial role. It provides a common reference point that helps link different datasets, making the operational data more meaningful and easier to use. Thanks to technology, such as the cloud and abundant connectivity, it’s now much easier to collaborate on data, gain context and then act on it. But we have to acknowledge that there’s still a long way to go before we deploy all the technology to create a better end-to-end flow of data and enhance the efficiency of the whole sector.

Having said that, I perceive a noticeable shift in how customers view their operations and the future. As the younger generation progresses into more senior roles, they bring their own thoughts and perspectives, and are potentially bolder when it comes to applying technology, interfacing and driving growth. We also see this trend among our public-sector customers, particularly when discussing the application of BIM (building information modelling, Ed.) to visualize their assets and manage them differently. This readiness to challenge established practices and rethink how they do business opens up significant opportunities, not just for us at Hexagon, but for the industry as a whole.

Staying with construction for a moment, many developed countries face major challenges in renovating highways, railways, bridges and more, while developing countries are creating new infrastructure. What’s your perspective on the opportunities this presents?

It’s true that there’s a different split between greenfield and brownfield projects, depending on which geography you’re in. When it comes to the resilience of existing infrastructure, our advanced monitoring solutions support long-term structural health by providing data as the basis for investments in preventative maintenance and planned improvements.

In terms of brownfield projects, and especially buildings, it’s often about making spaces adaptable for different uses over their lifetime. The effectiveness and efficiency with which you transform brownfield sites depends on accurately capturing the reality and utilizing what is already there. Scanning – be that airborne, mobile or indoor – is a big element of that. It actually drives a lot of demand for the geospatial industry and will be an essential part in shaping how the industry will move forward.

Moreover, whether for brownfield or greenfield projects, I believe improving efficiency – through automation, innovation and the adoption of technology – can both help address the labour shortages that are affecting most of our customers, and can also help meet sustainability goals by reducing waste. That’s another aspect that definitely offers opportunities for the geospatial industry.

Moving on from automation and AI, autonomy is another very important topic for our readers. How is Hexagon guiding this exciting development?

We’re increasingly seeing a shift beyond pure automation, which is governed by predefined patterns, to systems that are context-aware and can make decisions without human intervention. However, it’s a gradual and continuous process; it’s not as if the whole world will suddenly run autonomously from a certain date. The first step is to collect the data, and that’s already being done on a large scale. The tougher part is putting it into context, making sense of it and then – with deep domain and application expertise – building more autonomous solutions, step by step.

Along that journey, Hexagon contributes the high-accuracy measurement technology that gives context to data so that the software can then perform autonomous decision-making with precision. Our deep understanding of each application enables us to then integrate it into customers’ workflows so that autonomy becomes usable in their day-to-day operations. Human expertise is not only preserved through autonomy, but also enhanced by granting people more time to contribute where human ingenuity is essential.

We are all in an ecosystem that gravitates towards autonomy. We all play a role in that, and there’s still an ocean of opportunities yet to be revealed. No matter where we end up, I regard this as a fundamental trend that will definitely shape us as a company and the broader industry as much as we shape it.

Besides opportunities, the geospatial industry also faces some challenges and perhaps even threats. What do you regard as the main ones?

If you drill down into our industry, in view of the need to ensure the sustainable improvement of key infrastructure, one of the most fundamental challenges is the skills shortage. The shortage of talent is not restricted to the various trades that make up the construction industry but also affects the geospatial profession. As mentioned earlier, by cutting out repetitive processes, technology can help us keep pace with the growing opportunities by allowing experts to complete more projects, and faster, with fewer resources. At the same time, we also need to focus on bringing younger surveyors up to speed more quickly and making some aspects of geospatial technology more accessible so that a wider range of users can handle repetitive, routine tasks – freeing up experts to focus on the work where their skills are essential.  

Another challenge lies in handling the huge volumes of geospatial data that are acquired – whether terrestrial or airborne. The IT side of it is critical to master and yet needs to be integrated more into training and employee development. So in a way, these two challenges are interconnected. There’s not just a lack of talent in the geospatial profession, but also a shortage of some of the in-demand skills needed in modern-day surveying. That’s why we find it so important to develop solutions that help our customers leverage their knowhow without them needing to be an expert on AI or data handling.

How does Hexagon integrate satellite imagery and spaceborne remote sensing data into its solutions, and how is this reflected in partnerships with satellite data providers?

Satellite imagery provides a constantly updating macro view on Earth’s systems, and is a great tool for disaster response and monitoring environmental changes over time. It’s also a useful tool where airborne sensors are a challenge to mobilize – such as in geopolitically sensitive regions or very remote areas. Data collected with our airborne sensors or from our content programme complements satellite imagery by offering the higher resolution and precision that many applications require. In Southern California, for example, satellite data provides a broad overview of land cover changes and water body extents over time, but airborne data delivers higher accuracy for local land cover classification and elevation modelling to support more effective water management strategies.

Collaborations and partnerships among data providers are essential. By combining the expertise of various organizations, we enable new applications and insights and equip our customers with the data they need to make informed decisions.

About Henning Sandfort

Henning Sandfort is a member of Hexagon’s executive management team, president of Hexagon’s Geosystems division and CEO of Leica Geosystems. In these roles, he is responsible for shaping and directing the overall global strategy for the Geosystems division and the Leica Geosystems brand. Before joining Hexagon, he served as global CEO of the Building Products Business Unit in Siemens Smart Infrastructure for six years. Prior to that, he served as a top management consultant, product & portfolio manager and business leader in the industrial and building businesses at Siemens AG. Sandfort holds a Diploma in Industrial Engineering & Management from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany).