ESRI User Conference Day 2 - AI and ESRI's partnership with Microsoft get the spotlight

Where is the nearest oak tree close to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington? How many trees are in Washington DC? When is the trash pick-up date for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW? These are some of the questions that residents can answer using AI feature in the Open Data Portal.

ESRI's team along with its partners is testing models through which AI can be trained to search through and query data sets within the data portals of state and local government as well as within ArcGIS Hubs.

To ensure data are easy to discover, share, and can be reproduced, ESRI devoted a session on ensuring users are maintaining metadata and preparing it in a way it is ready for AI. How to ensure that AI assistance search is limited to data within the hub is something ESRI is still working on.

ESRI is working on a suite of tools to increase collaboration among teams and within community.  One such feature is the Discussion Board in ArcGIS Hub. For example, when a small team working for the parks and recreation has to decide some good spots to set up picnic tables, a user can invite other members in the team to share their comments.  Along similar lines, ESRI also gave considerable attention to its product Pipeline. Similar to Model Builder which works in ArcGIS Pro, Pipeline connects datasets and workflows in ArcGIS Online.  ESRI's collaborative tools are also aimed at including users and databases that are not spatial in nature such as Knowledge Graphs. Knowledge graphs harness the knowledge of graph theory to bring connections between people and places and what happens when one of the nodes in the chain gets affected by an externality. Clearly, with products like knowledge graph ESRI is reaching new territories as it brings people who are working with non-spatial data also into using ArcGIS products.

ESRI's partnership with Microsoft remained in the spotlight with sessions focused on Introduction to Microsoft Fabric, ArcGIS tools available in Office 365 with Excel, SharePoint, Power BI, and Teams.

After a series of technical sessions, the crowd was eagerly waiting to watch John Nelson's and Kenneth Field's session on Map Wizardry. Even 45 minutes before the session started, participants had already started queuing up outside the ballroom. With over 500 participants, this probably was the most attended session after the plenary. Both Kenneth and John kept the audience entertained and engaged with their cutting-edge techniques on 2D cartography while Nathan Shephard amazed the crowd with his 3D maps.

With several technical sessions and user presentations, ESRI continues to keep the voracious appetite of the conference attendees to come back for Day 3 of the conference.

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