Best of 2025: Top Companies Share the Impacts of Mapping and Analytics

Unexpected collaborations, fresh data mashups, newly solved business challenges. For several top companies, these 2025 highlights stemmed from a common practice: the effective use of mapping and analytics.

Across three webcast discussions this year, tech and business professionals from AECOM, Citizens Bank, Crescent Energy, Google, Prologis, Steamboat Ski Resort, Trader Joe’s, Verizon, and Walmart shared their views on geographic information system (GIS) technology and its impacts on their organizations. This five-minute video below captures a selection of their best insights.

Among other observations, they noted the power of mapping and analytics to:

• unify data that would otherwise remain siloed
• spark collaboration between teams
• detect patterns lingering beyond view
• inspire business units to address tough questions

The Impact of Mapping and Analytics

The three webcasts can be viewed in full, and the video transcript is below:

• Webcast 14: Location Intelligence in Unexpected Places [on demand]
• Webcast 15: The Art of Geospatial Strategy [on demand]
• Webcast 16: The Power of Mentorship for Analysts in Business [on demand]

Agnetha Garcia, Google [Webcast 16]

“I think of GIS as a unifying tool, because when you can mash up data from different aspects, maybe data that was never meant to be joined—going back to my world of network, there is your core, right? We have our routes, and we have our locations, and that’s what every telecommunications company would use—you see coverage maps and stuff. But then when you layer on other information—active storms, like a hurricane, fires, earthquakes—things that affect network, but maybe it’s not necessarily in your dataset, when you mash up things like that, I think it starts to show you things that maybe you didn’t see before.”

John Sauvageau, Citizens Bank [Webcast 15]

“For us at Citizens, geospatial—it’s not just about maps. It’s about using location-based data and technology to recognize and see patterns, make connections, and also spot different trends across different places.”

Jorge Cabanas, Trader Joe’s [Webcast 16]

“It’s the first time that now we’re collaborating—different departments are now collaborating. Now we can visualize things a lot easier. It makes a lot of decisions now easier for leadership being able to see something as simple as, ‘Hey, where are our distribution centers and how do they line up to sites we may be interested in or markets we may be interested in?’ Something as simple as that is just visualizing . . . taking what our logistics teams works on and taking us, the real estate side, and marrying those two things together.”

Jake Ingle, Steamboat Ski Resort [Webcast 14]

“When we installed these, I really felt like it was going to be a useful tool for our operators to empower them to be able to see where the snow pack was the deepest, and then fix spots where it was the thinnest. And when we built this system, we used an ortho image of our whole mountain as the background for this system. And what I found through that was . . . the unexpected use case for it was my operators were using that ortho map in very foggy and nasty snowstorms to navigate around the mountain.”

Heather Gamper, Walmart [Webcast 14]

“Data scientists effectively manage a lot of data and build a lot of data models. And so, I feel like that intersection of where data science and GIS can really meet, you get this unstoppable synergy in a sense, where the insights that you can derive are extremely powerful. So, it’s really harnessing all that data and connecting it into spatial analytics—that’s where you can really feel the power of GIS.”

Kent Kildow, Verizon [Webcast 14]

“That single pane of glass helps create a common operating picture, so everyone has the same vision or view of what the situation is in the field and can collaborate on a response, versus trying to understand what was happening and trying to sort through what can be conflicting information in the heat of the moment.”

Dane Myers, Prologis [Webcast 15]

“Prologis is an industrial real estate company that operates globally. So we often have to deal with data that is coming from multiple different locations, different sources, different platforms, and we use geospatial data as, essentially, a gluing point—we assign the data to that location and then bring everything together.”

Andy Wohlsperger, AECOM [Webcast 15]

“What we’ve seen is that the use cases of GIS have really exploded within our project delivery, once we brought in the non-GIS professional. Once our engineers or scientists saw the value of GIS . . . those that were converted are bringing use cases in that I think the GIS professional probably would not have seen.”

Megan Southerland, Crescent Energy [Webcast 16]

“When you start asking thoughtful questions, you naturally start to seek out those who have the right answer. You can collaborate and build your confidence and your problem-solving. And for me, that’s where growth truly happens, where curiosity meets this connection piece, and that’s the foundation of spatial analytics. That’s when we move as GIS professionals from making maps to providing meaning.”