Why GISTC International conference should be on your 2027 radar
Article published in partnership with Supermap
Participants at the inaugural GISTC International in Haikou, China. Image: GISTC International 2026 press material.
AI is changing how we work with geographic information. For GIS teams, the next step is making it useful in everyday projects: updating land records, managing urban infrastructure or improving disaster warnings. That was the focus of the first GISTC International, held in Haikou, China, from 19 to 22 October 2026.
Organized by SuperMap, the Geospatial Intelligence Software Technology Conference International brought together more than 120 experts, industry leaders and researchers from nearly 15 countries, according to the organizers. The event was supported by the United Nations Global Geospatial Knowledge and Innovation Centre and the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG).
International experience with practical GIS projects
Participants from countries including South Korea, Australia, Greece, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, Nigeria, Ghana and Indonesia shared experience from national projects. Discussions covered GeoAI, geospatial data infrastructure and the challenges of making these technologies accessible to more organizations.
This is where an international conference can be particularly useful. A land administration team in one country may face many of the same data and coordination problems as a team elsewhere. Comparing approaches helps practitioners understand what they could apply at home, and what would need to change. The mix of countries gave GISTC a useful starting point for those conversations.
Michalis Kalogiannakis, Vice President of the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG), delivers a presentation.
From GIS tools to geospatial AI agents
SuperMap outlined its direction for combining AI and GIS, including a move toward AI agents with geospatial capabilities. The company also described its I-DAKA framework, a five-layer approach to applying digital and AI technologies.
For practitioners, the interesting part is what this could mean for their work. AI agents could help users carry out GIS tasks more easily, but their value will depend on reliable results and how well they fit existing workflows. Bringing software developers and people responsible for delivering projects into the same room creates an opportunity to discuss those requirements directly.
Time to learn and apply the technology
The program included four parallel forums and an International GIS Workshop, combining discussion with practical training. Topics ranged from land administration and urban planning to water resources, energy and disaster risk. For people choosing where to spend their conference time and budget, that combination offers a clear benefit: a chance to understand the technology and develop the skills to use it.
SuperMap also described its growing international portfolio of industry solutions. According to the company, its software supports projects in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, including AI-assisted mapping, cadastral reform, digital twins and environmental monitoring. These applications give the conversation a concrete basis, especially for organizations working on similar projects.
Song Guanfu, Chairman and CEO of SuperMap, addresses the conference.
Put GISTC on your 2027 radar
GISTC International has made a promising start. Its combination of international project experience, software development and practical training gives GIS professionals a reason to follow what comes next.
As you plan your conference calendar for 2027, keep GISTC International in mind. The first edition suggests it could become a useful meeting point for people applying GeoAI in government, infrastructure and natural resource management. Dates for a 2027 edition are still to be confirmed, so watch for the next announcement.
Follow updates on the official GISTC International website.
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CARTO Brings Its Founder Back as CEO. Now Agentic GIS Must Become a Business
Article published in partnership with Supermap
CARTO co-founder Javier de la Torre will return as CEO on November 1, replacing Luis Sanz, who has led the company since 2019 and will remain on its board.
CARTO presents the transition as a planned handover aligned with what it calls its largest opportunity yet: Agentic GIS. According to the company, Sanz told the board earlier in 2026 that he wanted to step down once CARTO was ready for its next chapter.
That explanation may be entirely accurate. But founder returns rarely happen without strategic significance. De la Torre is taking control as CARTO must prove that its ambitious product vision can generate sustainable enterprise growth, defend the company against much larger competitors and satisfy the financial expectations attached to a venture-backed software business.
The company Sanz rebuilt
When Sanz became CEO, CARTO was still widely associated with web maps, visualization and CartoDB. Under his leadership, it repositioned itself around cloud-native spatial analytics.
The strategic bet was that organizations would increasingly store data in Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Databricks, Amazon Redshift and similar platforms. CARTO would run spatial analysis inside those environments rather than moving data into a separate GIS stack.
Investors supported that direction with a $61 million Series C round in 2021. CARTO subsequently expanded its enterprise platform, workflow tools, data marketplace and integrations with the major cloud-data providers.
De la Torre is not returning to reverse that strategy. He is returning to build the next commercial layer on top of it.
Agentic GIS is credible, but no longer uncontested
CARTO for Agents lets AI systems query governed customer data, execute spatial workflows and generate maps. Its components include a command-line interface, more than 20 agent skills and an MCP server that exposes approved workflows as agent tools.
The architecture addresses a genuine problem. General-purpose language models are poor at reliable spatial reasoning unless they receive the right tools, data and constraints. CARTO can provide deterministic spatial operations while keeping computation inside the customer’s existing warehouse and security environment.
But agentic GIS is rapidly becoming a competitive category, not a CARTO-exclusive market. Esri is adding assistants across ArcGIS. Mapbox exposes location services through MCP. Felt offers an MCP-based GIS interface. Google has opened experimental access to a Geospatial Reasoning Agent.
Snowflake, Databricks and other cloud-data companies could also absorb more spatial functionality into their own AI platforms. CARTO’s window of differentiation may therefore be shorter than its announcement suggests.
What about profitability?
There is no reliable public evidence that CARTO is currently unprofitable or experiencing a cash crisis. As a private company, it does not disclose consolidated revenue, operating profit, free cash flow, cash reserves or burn rate. Online revenue estimates vary so widely that they should not be treated as financial evidence.
Profitability pressure is nevertheless a reasonable hypothesis, provided it is clearly labelled as such.
CARTO raised its last publicly announced major equity round almost five years ago. That does not prove financial weakness. It could indicate capital discipline, sufficient recurring revenue or access to undisclosed financing. But it also means management must increasingly demonstrate that the 2021 investment created a scalable business rather than an expanding portfolio of technically impressive products.
CARTO’s current pricing model offers both metered consumption and committed enterprise tiers, including cloud-marketplace billing. That structure can reduce initial purchasing friction while securing larger annual commitments. Agentic workflows may increase query and compute consumption, creating revenue without requiring a proportional increase in licensed human users.
The risk is the opposite: if agents make individual analysts more productive, customers may need fewer seats. CARTO must capture part of the resulting value through consumption, enterprise governance and high-value production workloads.
Sovereignty offers a second route to revenue
De la Torre has also become a vocal advocate for European technological sovereignty. CARTO recently introduced Portolan and CARTO SDI, aimed at governments and data publishers that want interoperable spatial infrastructure under their own control.
This could open durable public-sector revenue, particularly as European institutions reconsider dependence on US-controlled clouds and proprietary platforms. Self-hosted, sovereign and air-gapped deployments can also command larger contracts.
However, government procurement is slow, implementation-heavy and politically exposed. CARTO will need to convert studies, specifications and institutional interest into funded deployments with repeatable economics.
The real meaning of the founder’s return
The optimistic interpretation is that de la Torre brings founder-level conviction at the moment when natural-language interfaces can finally democratize spatial analysis.
The more financially focused interpretation is that CARTO needs a sharper story, faster product decisions and stronger monetization after years of investment.
Both can be true.
The next evidence should not be another AI demonstration. It should be named production customers, agent usage at scale, independently measured reliability, public-sector contract wins and clearer commercial indicators. If those appear, the founder’s return may mark CARTO’s transition from cloud-native GIS challenger to a defining platform for agentic spatial work.
If they do not, Agentic GIS risks becoming a compelling new label in a market where every major platform is learning to speak the same language.
