Facebook is using AI to turn 2D photos into 3D photos. Fun for consumers. The question is to what degree can Facebook’s convolutional neural net-powered technology be used to disrupt legacy geospatial/GIS offerings from companies such as Verisk (tkr: VRSK), ESRI (private), Trimble (tkr: TRMB), Garmin (tkr: GRMN), Pitney Bowes (tkr: PBI) and many others?
This capability could be marketed to insurance carriers as a powerful tool to help underwriters more accurately assess risk and to help claims investigators more accurately assess damage. There are a number of military use cases that come to mind as well. This is why we consistently repeat our mantra that scale matters. Especially within the Technology industry where large platform companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook are a potential threat to every economic sector should they have the will to compete.