How Does AI Let People Who Are Not Analysts Use Satellite Images?

Will Marshall says the daily scan produces more imagery than almost anyone can use. NASA can work with it because it has about a thousand people who know how to analyze satellite data. A farmer in Kansas or a journalist in Kentucky cannot do much with 4 million images of 47 megapixels every day.

AI is what lets someone ask a question in ordinary language and get an answer, and he expects that to multiply the number of users. Shrinking satellites so many of them can fly was, in his comparison, the move from a mainframe to a desktop. AI is the operating system that makes the desktop useful to people who are not specialists. Defense and intelligence can use it to watch large areas for threats. He thinks the larger expansion is commercial and civil work: firefighters, farmers, and counties looking for fires, crops, or activity such as swimming pools built without a permit. The pictures were available in principle. The AI is what makes them usable in practice.

The compute for that work sits mainly on Google Cloud, with some on AWS. Selling data was already the business. The newer tools add flexible analysis, which Planet calls solutions, so a user can ask a question instead of running a narrow product.