About this episode

Ian Schuler discusses the transition to cloud-native geospatial and the impact of AI on data accessibility.

Ian Schuler is the CEO of Development Seed — the team behind a lot of the open source tooling that quietly holds up the geospatial world. He's been at the helm for over a decade, and in this conversation, we dig into what he calls the great retooling: the idea that cloud-native geospatial is about to flip from an emerging pattern to the dominant one, and that AI is the thing tipping it over the edge. The argument is simple — agents want to discover your data, query it, transform it, and hand back an answer. If your data isn't in a format they can reach, you're simply not part of the conversation anymore. A really enjoyable one. I hope you get as much out of it as I did. Register for the forum 👉 https://2026.cloudnativegeo.org — This episode is sponsored by the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum. The CNG Forum 2026 runs October 6–9 at Snowbird, Utah — three days of real-world cloud-native geospatial (STAC, COGs, GeoParquet, Zarr, and more) with the teams actually building this stuff at scale, plus a hands-on workshop day to kick things off. Register at https://2026.cloudnativegeo.org

People in this episode

Guest: Ian Schuler

Topics covered

• cloud-native geospatial
• AI in geospatial
• open source tooling
• data discovery
• geospatial transformation

Keywords

• cloud-native
• geospatial
• AI
• open source
• data transformation
• Development Seed

Sponsors

Cloud Native Geospatial Forum

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Development Seed

Places: Snowbird, Utah

More episodes of The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography

• Cloud Native for the Rest of Us · July 20, 2026 · 38 min
• Mapping With 360 Cameras · July 15, 2026 · 42 min
• Who Pays for Open Source? · July 1, 2026 · 54 min
• Earth Observation - The Invisible Industry · June 17, 2026 · 1h 7m

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography podcast page.