All posts by Richard Thomas
Agentic AI Has to Know Where It Is
Esri’s distinguished product manager for geospatial AI has been shipping AI inside ArcGIS since the ArcMap era. A conversation after this year’s User Conference covers the real difference between an AI assistant and an agent, why Esri built its own governance board around the distinction, and what MCP actually solves for a profession that can’t...
Digital Twins Are a Journey, Not a Product
Esri’s Technology Director for AEC spent roughly three decades on the industry side, most of it at Arcadis, before joining Esri to work the problem from the platform side. His case for digital twins starts with the mix of expertise required inside an AEC firm and ends with a flood-control system in South Florida he...
Reality Capture Is Becoming the New Mapping Process
Esri’s CTO of Digital Twins spent years building the photogrammetry engine underneath ArcGIS Reality before Esri acquired his company outright. A conversation after this year’s User Conference covers what changed when Gaussian splatting arrived, why survey-grade accuracy still matters in an AI-driven capture environment, and what a working geospatial digital twin actually looks like in...
The Unity Thesis: Trimble’s Case for One Connected Asset Lifecycle
From GIS context and survey-grade positioning to asset management and field capture, Trimble is making the case for one connected asset lifecycle — a system in which precise location, operational software and shared data reinforce one another, and where the AI layered on top is valued less for novelty than for producing consistent, trustworthy results....
Esri User Conference 2026: What the Sessions Add Up To
More than fifteen thousand people filled the San Diego Convention Center for Esri’s 46th annual User Conference this year, with roughly that many more watching by livestream from 117 countries. Taken session by session, the program is a wide survey of a mapping platform still expanding in every direction. Taken together, it resolves into a...
The Chain That Counts
Four specialists on what actually separates a drone data product from a deliverable a surveyor will stamp The unmanned systems industry has spent a decade getting very good at one thing: flying. The airframes are capable, the sensors are capable, and the regulatory framework, while still evolving, is no longer the primary bottleneck it was...