Modern maps have taken a dramatic leap. They’re not maps as most people picture them. They’ve quietly become something else entirely.
For 4,000 years, maps did one thing: they described the world. Beautifully, sometimes. Accurately, increasingly. But they were static. They told you where things were.
Modern maps do something fundamentally different. They run the world.
The technology behind this is GIS – geographic information systems. I’ve devoted my career to building it. What GIS does, at its core, is assign a location to any kind of data and then let you see that data as a map. That sounds simple. The implications are not.
A modern GIS-powered map can absorb almost any kind of data – demographic, environmental, financial, real-time sensor data, satellite imagery, drone footage. And it can layer all of that data together, pinned to location, so that patterns emerge that you simply cannot see any other way. No other medium in our data-flooded world can do both of those things at once. A spreadsheet can tell you what happened. Only a modern map can tell you where – and where is almost always the variable that explains why.
So valuable is the modern map – the digital, GIS-powered, AI-enabled map – Forbes recently named me one of America’s 250 most important living innovators. I’m honored. But here’s what I think the recognition is really about. It’s about what the modern map has become – the operating system for the way things run.
ØRSTED, THE DANISH ENERGY COMPANY, used GIS to site more than 150 offshore wind turbines across 150 square miles of North Sea. Each turbine had to be positioned not just for its own wind exposure, but for how it would affect airflow across every neighboring turbine. An Ørsted engineer can place turbines on a map, run a simulation, see the electricity output, see the wake effects, reposition and try again – all before a single foundation is poured. An $8 billion project, optimized on a map. That’s not describing the world. That’s running it.
Chattanooga used GIS to map every tree in the city, then layered that data against block-by-block heat measurements to find the precise spots where planting 5,000 new trees would most reduce heat island effects on vulnerable residents.
Brisbane, Australia – host of the 2032 Olympics – is using a “digital twin” built on GIS to manage dozens of interlocking construction projects across the city in real time. The same living map will help manage crowds and events when the Olympics arrive.
The precision of modern maps lets you see your world, your business, your operations differently.
WHAT I’VE COME TO BELIEVE – and what I’ve watched happen across virtually every industry – is that the modern map has become an operating system for decisions. Whatever technology you’re working with – AI, big data, advanced analytics – it becomes more useful when location is part of it. Location is the variable that connects everything else. It’s what lets you move from knowing something to acting on it.
One thing that has changed dramatically in the past decade: modern maps present data in ways legible to everyone. They present the same picture of a situation – a problem, an event, a risk, a crisis, an opportunity – as a starting point for everyone involved. They invite collaboration across functions, across divisions, even across different points of view.
Modern mapping technology, infused with AI, is also easier to learn and easier to use. A county emergency manager, a retail analyst, a conservation biologist – all of them can build and use maps that would have required specialists a decade ago. That matters. It means the power of spatial analysis is reaching the people who need it most, not just the largest organizations that can afford dedicated teams.
When Forbes recognizes innovators in San Francisco later this week, the list will include people who built things that are obviously new – technologies that didn’t exist a generation ago. I’m part of something different: A community that took one of humanity’s original technologies and fundamentally changed what it could do. The map is 4,000 years old. What we’ve made it capable of, in just the last decade, is something genuinely new. And we’re still in the early chapters of what it will become.
