Exploring Geospatial Innovation at Esri India Developer Summit Day-2, Hyderabad
I had the opportunity to attend Day 2 of the Esri India Developer Summit 2025, held in Hyderabad on May 30th. Although I couldn’t attend the entire summit, the second day alone offered a powerful glimpse into the future of geospatial technology. The focus was especially on the intersection of AI, cloud-native infrastructure, and app development.
GeoAI and LLMs in ArcGIS
One of the strongest themes of the day was the growing integration of AI and deep learning within the ArcGIS ecosystem. From leveraging imagery, vector, text, and 3D data to experimenting with foundation models and large language models (LLMs), it’s clear that Esri India is moving decisively toward supporting modern, data-driven geospatial workflows.
The potential of vision-language models to enhance existing processes—and the use of LLMs for tasks like natural language-based geocoding—felt not just promising but truly within reach. What stood out most was how easily users can now build custom AI models using foundational architectures like SAM, TextSAM, Prithvi, DOFA, and more.
These models integrate seamlessly into spatial analysis pipelines. For developers, the Python module arcgis.learn continues to be a game-changer—simplifying experimentation and enabling rapid prototyping and deployment of intelligent, geospatially-aware applications.
Enterprise GIS: Secure, Scalable, and Cloud-Ready
On the enterprise front, the focus was sharply on scalability, security, and deployment flexibility. Sessions on ArcGIS Enterprise running on Kubernetes and best practices for security showcased how organizations are embracing cloud-native strategies to modernize their geospatial infrastructure.
Witnessing ArcGIS align with modern DevOps workflows painted a clear picture of what’s possible when GIS operations become truly scalable and secure. Kubernetes empowers organizations to deploy ArcGIS Enterprise with remarkable flexibility and resilience, optimizing resource management and seamless scaling.
The strong emphasis on security assured me that sensitive geospatial data can be confidently managed in the cloud. Plus, the one-click update feature in ArcGIS Enterprise stands out as a game-changer—enabling teams to stay up-to-date with the latest features and security patches without costly downtime.
Other Highlights
What tied the day together was the seamless convergence of AI, cloud-native infrastructure, customization, and enterprise GIS. Parallelly, there were sessions in Hall 2 covering a diverse range of topics—from real-time analytics and web mapping pipelines to ArcGIS Indoors and CAD-GIS integration—that I couldn’t attend, but which reinforced the depth and breadth of the ArcGIS ecosystem.
Meanwhile, sessions like ArcGIS Experience Builder highlighted just how accessible it has become to create tailored spatial applications. These tools strike a strong balance between ease of use and developer control.
More broadly, the tools and workflows showcased throughout the day felt not just forward-looking but production-ready—signaling that ArcGIS is evolving rapidly. It is now supporting innovation at scale across imagery, app development, and enterprise deployment.
Conclusion
Even in just one day, the experience was well worth it. I’m walking away with ideas to try out, new tools to explore, and a renewed sense of how powerful the modern GIS stack is becoming.
I’ve long had a bit of a love-hate relationship with ArcGIS—appreciating its capabilities, while sometimes feeling limited by its rigidity. But seeing how seamlessly foundation models are being integrated into the ArcGIS ecosystem—and how straightforward it now feels to build on top of them using your own domain-specific data is impressive.
These aren’t just out-of-the-box solutions; they’re adaptable tools that let you take control. With this growing arsenal of GeoAI features and enterprise-ready infrastructure, I’m especially looking forward to Esri launching its own MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which could transform how users interact with geospatial AI in truly intuitive ways.