Geo Week board members identify a series of underrecognized geospatial breakthroughs that they believe will have outsized impact over the next five years, arguing that the most important changes are emerging in how data is collected, processed, shared, and used in decision making. Rather than focusing on headline-grabbing trends, they point to practical advances in mobile mapping systems, edge computing, specialized Artificial Intelligence models, cloud-native standards, and the changing expectations for geospatial professionals as the quiet forces reshaping workflows and value across industries.
Land mobile mapping systems are highlighted by Dr. Mohamed M.R. Mostafa as a key example of a technology whose importance is outpacing its visibility, driven by the convergence of lidar, high-resolution imagery, GNSS, and inertial sensors on mobile platforms. He notes that these systems are enabling more efficient infrastructure asset management for governments and are becoming core data sources for the high-definition maps required in advanced autonomous vehicle development. At the same time, several board members single out edge computing as a breakthrough already transforming field operations, with Patrick Lohman emphasizing that as compute gets cheaper and Artificial Intelligence models shrink, field workers can run expert-level analysis directly on phones or drones without internet, receiving instant validation instead of waiting for post-processing.
Jason Stoker adds that processing data closer to the sensor reduces latency and bandwidth requirements while enabling faster decisions in data-intensive scenarios like disaster response and infrastructure monitoring. In focused analytical tasks such as classifying ground surfaces from point clouds, Martin Flood stresses that advances in Artificial Intelligence models over just the past year have produced ground classifiers that already outperform traditional algorithmic approaches, significantly cutting manual editing and cleanup. Stoker and Aaron Addison point to cloud-native formats such as COGs, COPC, Zarr, GeoParquet, modern point-cloud streaming protocols, and the growing role of STAC as a quiet revolution in storage, access, discoverability, and interoperability that is moving the industry away from proprietary formats and toward standardized APIs. Dr. Julia Wagemann argues that Artificial Intelligence is shifting, not eliminating, geospatial professions, increasing the need for practitioners who start with real-world problems and work backward to apply spatial analysis. Looking further ahead, Dr. Shawana Johnson notes that quantum computing could usher in a new age of space-based communications, with implications for precision, navigation, timing, cybersecurity, and both defense and commercial geospatial applications, underscoring that incremental advances across these domains are collectively redefining how geospatial technology will be used and valued in the coming years.
