Esri India Technologies announced the opening of a new geographic information system (GIS) and AI competency centre in Noida on July 1. The company will invest over ₹150 crore in this initiative over the next five years. The centre aims to accelerate the use of AI in GIS applications across various sectors in India.
The new facility will expand Esri India’s workforce with AI specialists, data scientists, GIS experts, and domain professionals. Their focus will be on developing AI-powered geospatial solutions that help customers process data, extract insights, and automate decision-making.
Agendra Kumar, managing director, Esri India, said, “The speed of change is so high that without strategic investments, it will not be possible to lead the transformative use of AI in GIS applications.”
Focus on Local Talent
The engineers at the new centre will integrate AI into spatial analysis to support faster, data-driven decisions. This includes automating routine GIS tasks, identifying patterns, and predicting trends in real-time.
Esri India also plans to work with academic and research institutions to build local GeoAI talent. The company will release AI-ready datasets trained with Indian data and strengthen its capability to meet the rising demand for AI in GIS.
Esri India has already supported AI integration in areas such as land, asset and disaster management, object identification from imagery, and video analytics for Indian users.
“We have close to 6,500 organisational customers in the country. In terms of users, maybe 1.2 million people use some app running on our technology every day,” Kumar told AIM in an exclusive interview recently.
Esri’s scope is quite vast, ranging from national mapping agencies to utilities such as electric distribution companies, city gas firms, and telecom giants like Jio and Airtel.
GIS Applications
Citing examples from traffic analysis to identifying defence vehicles or aircraft, Esri India delves into many other aspects such as defence and security, government, utilities, urban management, 3D mapping, digital twins, etc.
Kumar explained to AIM, “Human identification can be done, for example, in our office, we counted the number of people passing near the reception [using this]. Even face recognition can be done if it is required.”
The company’s Indo ArcGIS is a comprehensive GIS software platform that enables organisations to create, manage, and analyse spatial data. It supports mapping, data integration, and location-based intelligence for diverse sectors.
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