Industry Leaders Join Planet AI Symposium: A Virtual Event Exploring the Future of “Geospatial Artificial Intelligence”

Today, we are proud to launch the Planet AI Symposium, a virtual event where leading experts join Planet to discuss the future of artificial intelligence. This event explores how the intersection of AI and Earth observation data could help build a more secure, sustainable, and resilient world.

The Arc of Geospatial AI

Our event is here to showcase Planet’s story arc with AI and geospatial data – where we started and where we are going. Through this journey, we’ll also hear from fellow industry experts and leaders on where they see the global arc of AI, and “Geospatial AI” in particular, moving in the future. Fundamentally, AI isn’t new to the world—or to Planet. We’ve been leveraging AI for over a decade, mostly in the form of computer vision, helping us and our partners detect and classify objects in our data, but we’ve also been leveraging AI technology in our hardware and our data analysis products. 

For example, this work, in partnership with SCCON in Brazil, has helped combat environmental crimes in the Amazon, and more recently, in partnership with Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, our data provided building damage assessments following the Los Angeles fires. On the hardware side, our SuperDove satellites were our first ML-led satellites, producing 8 spectral bands for machine analysis. Our Planetary Variables products combine satellite data and machine learning to deliver advanced data feeds, quantifying change on our Earth, such as Forest Carbon. 

We believe that AI needs geospatial data as AI needs a robust amount of quality data and increasingly AI efforts are focused on addressing real world challenges. Likewise, geospatial needs AI as our Earth data has huge value, but with AI, we can make sense of the complexity of such vast amounts of data and extract meaningful insights, helping analysts identify unknown unknowns in imagery – the critical pieces of information that analysts may not even know to look for. With AI, we’ve already started leveraging this capability, training thousands of datasets with specific objects, in particular buildings, roads, ships and planes. 

With our partners, we’re advancing this work, detecting and classifying these objects with precise locations and confidence scores. In the maritime domain awareness space, we have customers now monitoring large ocean areas for illegal fishing vessels, military activity, or illicit ship-to-ship transfers. We are downloading over 30 TB a day and our planetary scan includes about 3,500 layers of data from around the globe. With recent advances in AI, we see potential to speed time to value for users, to quickly get to the answers they need.

Time to action is crucial for our customers, so our next generation high-resolution constellation, Pelican, aims to accelerate our data delivery and provide insights in near-real time. Earlier this month, we successfully launched our Pelican-2 satellite into orbit equipped with NVIDIA’s Jetson AI Platform. This AI technology aims to enable onboard edge compute to help rapidly transform our data into insights for customers. With AI processing happening right on our satellite, we unlock the potential to automatically identify objects of interest in our data from space and deliver it to our customers faster than ever before. We’re set to launch more Pelican satellites this year. 

We’ve said it before: Just like how Google indexed the internet to make it searchable, we’re working to index the Earth and make it searchable. We believe AI will play a big part in executing this mission. 

We’ve only just scratched the surface here. There is so much to come from Geospatial AI, and these industry leaders have a lot more to say on the topic. So, we encourage you to explore the Planet AI Symposium to hear how satellite data and AI are driving data-driven decisions and delivering innovative solutions to address peace and security, sustainability and regulation, and digitization. Join us today to hear more!

Comprehensive List of Speakers

Keynote speakers

• Dario Amodei – CEO and Co-Founder, Anthropic
• Al Gore – Former U.S. Vice President and Co-Founder, Climate TRACE
• Jay Raymond – General (Ret.), First Chief of Space Operations, U.S. Space Force
• Eric Schmidt – Former CEO and Chairman, Google, KBE

Partner Speakers

• Juan M Lavista Ferres – Corporate Vice President & Chief Data Scientist, Microsoft AI For Good Research Lab
• Martina Löfqvist – Head of Strategy and Partnerships, Picterra
• Charles Davis – Chief Executive Officer, Earth-i
• Andy Carroll – Co-Founder and CTO, Skytec

Planet Speakers

• Will Marshall – Co-Founder and CEO, Planet
• Andrew Zolli – Chief Impact Officer, Planet
• Kiruthika Deveraj – Vice President of Engineering, Planet

Forward-looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release are “forward-looking statements” about Planet within the meaning of the securities laws, including statements about Planet’s strategic partnerships, Planet’s ability to capture market opportunity and realize any of the potential benefits from current or future product enhancements, the expansion of the high resolution capacity of Planet’s fleet and the delivery of such capacity to Planet customers, Planet’s future growth in new and existing markets and Planet’s ability to scale to meet customer and partner demand. Such statements, which are not of historical fact, involve assumptions, judgments and uncertainties. There are a number of factors that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those addressed in the forward-looking statements. Such factors are detailed in Planet’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Planet does not undertake an obligation to update its forward-looking statements to reflect future events, except as required by applicable law.