Location Intelligence Promotes Stakeholder Collaboration: Esri MX

Q: After 45 years of partnership as SIGSA, what were the strategic and operational drivers that required the establishment of Esri MX as an independent, locally-led entity?

A: SIGSA essentially created the foundation of the geospatial community in Mexico over 45 years ago and led spatial innovation in the country. Today, the speed of technological transformation compels us to seek greater agility and deeper focus. We see this as a new chapter for us.

This spin-off allows Esri MX to be more focused, giving us the ability to adapt and localize Esri’s innovations for the Mexican market. Concurrently, it enables us to deepen our commitment to growing the geospatial community in Mexico. We work extensively with educational institutions to develop the next generation of spatial leaders. Our immediate priority is to ensure seamless continuity for our clients by providing the same team of experts and offering them peace of mind. The long-term plan involves steadily growing this team to build expertise across more sectors and to swiftly integrate emerging technologies that are advancing at an ever-increasing rate. 

Q: How does this new market approach for Mexico enhance the agility and autonomy required to address the country’s unique challenges, such as accelerated urbanization and infrastructure resilience?

A: The goal of this strategic focus is precisely to bring Esri's solutions closer to Mexico, prioritizing those that address the country's most significant challenges, which range from increasing resilience against environmental phenomena to tackling issues like public safety and improving urban planning and the provision of public services.

This new entity, Esri MX, grants us direct access to all of Esri’s global innovation while maintaining a crucial local focus to adapt these solutions to the Mexican environment. Furthermore, it allows us to deepen our commitment to talent development. Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) were once a specialized topic, but now location data is a fundamental component of the vast information generated today. Ignoring the location component means organizations are losing a significant portion of the data available to them.

This growing need for location intelligence requires a large number of professionals prepared in geospatial subjects, capable of understanding and leveraging this technology and the associated data. Part of our new chapter's focus is to concentrate entirely on Esri’s solutions and on preparing a new generation of people who can help Mexican organizations utilize spatial analysis to make superior decisions.

Q: What are the most pressing challenges the Mexican government and private sector face in terms of infrastructure, and how does Esri MX’s expertise help them overcome them?

A: The primary and most powerful tool Mexico needs to solve these challenges is high-quality information: current, reliable, visible, and connected. This is precisely where GIS provides tremendous value.

For instance, many infrastructure issues stem from administrative complexities, poor planning, lack of oversight in project progress, and regulatory bottlenecks. GIS helps overcome this by providing what we call a Common Operating Picture. This system allows users to view diverse types of information in a single, connected environment. This unified view enables teams to understand the current status, track projects, plan new infrastructure development effectively, and manage maintenance. Crucially, access to the same reliable information ensures accountability across all stakeholders.

Another vital application is the creation of Digital Twins. Digital Twins, powered by GIS, are especially crucial for public services and infrastructure because these are inherently network-based: water, electricity, gas, and telecommunications. To maintain and expand these networks, you must understand their exact location, the terrain, and how they interact.

GIS provides a clear and accessible visualization of the current situation, highlighting where maintenance is needed and what assets will be affected. This enables efficient, collaborative planning. Ideally, utility providers could use this common operating picture to coordinate maintenance plans. This eliminates the inefficiency of digging up a street for a water leak, only to have another company dig up the same area four months later for gas line work. A shared spatial view leads to more efficient resource utilization, fewer problems for citizens, and better service delivery. Location is the common factor for all infrastructure matters, underpinning accountability through this shared operational picture.

Q: Given the nearshoring trend and the need for more efficient supply chains, how does Esri help the Mexican manufacturing and logistics sectors to optimize their operations in this context?

A: Nearshoring is a much-heralded phenomenon, but to genuinely exploit its potential, we must clearly understand our resources, conditions, and locations. Geospatial technology is essential here, starting with Site Selection. Companies need to know where they have access to critical infrastructure, such as the quality of the road network and the capacity of the electricity grid to support a major operation. An efficient supply chain requires seamless access, whether by road or port, for moving materials.

We also need to manage the planning of peripheral services required to absorb new investment. This involves more than just the factory itself; it includes where people will live, where suppliers will locate, and coordinating the electricity, water, and logistics infrastructure. 

For example, Queretaro attracted major data centers from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, largely because its electrical grid meets essential sustainability and reliability requirements. While these companies typically require at least two power providers to establish data centers, which is not possible in Mexico, Queretaro offered the necessary quality and a centralized, safe location. This location also ensures lower latency times for the rest of the country. This critical analysis is made significantly easier and more intuitive when visualized on a map.

One vital element for successful investment, which is often overlooked, is the availability of the right talent. When locating an asset, companies must have access to the necessary workforce, and this demographic analysis is fully integrated into our geospatial systems.

It is pointless to establish a factory if you cannot hire the people with the required skills, or if there is no sufficient local pool of talent that can be given final training. Analyzing this factor is crucial for success and has historically driven the formation of industrial clusters. Examples include the aerospace cluster in Queretaro or the medical cluster between Tijuana and San Diego. These successful areas possess not just logistical advantages, but also the critical human or natural resources needed to make the investment profitable.

Q: How can geospatial technology and other tech advances help Mexican cities transition from a reactive to a predictive stance toward climate events like Hurricane Otis and unpredictable seismic activity?

A: The area of emergency response is one where we have focused some of our strongest efforts. GIS is fundamental in transitioning our approach from reactive to proactive when managing emergencies. This involves predictive modeling to identify where flooding may occur, which areas will be most affected, and, when paired with a digital twin, assessing the potential damage to buildings from events like earthquakes or hurricanes. For hurricanes, we can review the projected path, estimate potential damage, and analyze infrastructure conditions to withstand the impact.

Closer to an emergency, GIS is crucial for logistics planning: identifying shelter locations, determining the safest evacuation routes, and pre-positioning emergency personnel and supplies. Once the emergency passes, it enables a swift response by identifying safe aid routes and tracking the location of first responders for rapid and secure deployment. The long-term goal is to build greater resilience through better planning. 

Q: What is Esri MX's vision for the Mexican infrastructure market, and what geospatial technologies do you consider to have the potential to drive the highest return on investment for the country's projects over the next five years?

A: The Mexican market still has considerable opportunity to adopt new technologies and become more efficient. The key idea is to focus on solutions that increase organizational resilience and transform maintenance from corrective to predictive. A clear, current view of existing assets and conditions is essential for this shift.

We currently deploy technology that, for example, uses vehicles to capture street-level imagery. Artificial Intelligence (AI) then analyzes those images, identifies potholes and other damage, assesses the severity of the problems, and efficiently directs resources to where they are most needed. This process can efficiently analyze hundreds of thousands of images in a short time, quickly identifying the most critical issues.

We have an opportunity to address the water network issues. In Mexico City, for instance, approximately 50% of the water supply is lost to leaks, a rate that urgently requires correction -  a critical issue largely due to aging systems and incomplete records, a problem that is not exclusive to Mexican cities. Today, most water organizations have only a roughly mapped network, lacking essential details about material, diameter, installation date, or exact location. The first, fundamental step is mapping this infrastructure and documenting its condition.

Once the infrastructure is mapped, more advanced technologies become useful. We can then leverage IoT sensors to detect leaks before they become serious. AI can be used to analyze large data sets swiftly, allowing quick decisions on where to focus efforts. Digital Twins and 3D information offer a rapid visualization of these complex systems. However, to be honest, while these advanced tools are essential for efficiency, we must begin with the basics. We cannot effectively use AI if we do not know the location of our assets. The foundation must be an accurate, spatial inventory of what we have and where it is.

Finally, GIS facilitates collaboration. We now have access to super-high-resolution satellite imagery that enables the construction of a 3D digital twin of a city. The next crucial step is ensuring that all stakeholders, water system managers, urban planners, and traffic departments, share and view this common information. 

That shared spatial understanding is what will deliver the greatest return on investment, enabling smarter planning, faster response, and more sustainable infrastructure for Mexico’s future

Q: Could you provide an example of a successful project where cross-institutional data sharing has yielded positive infrastructure results?

A: We executed a revealing project in Juarez, Chihuahua: by mapping the location of manufacturing plants, bus stops, and crime data, we discovered that moving a single bus stop just 40m closer to a factory exit eliminated a high-risk route for female workers. Similarly, noticing a correlation between crime and non-functional streetlights becomes evident. GIS allows you to find these crucial patterns and correlations, which remain invisible in a spreadsheet, by making complex data intuitive and visually accessible, a story you can see. And sometimes, seeing is all it takes to make a small change that transforms everyday life..

Q: How is the firm's local leadership positioning Esri MX to become the primary technological partner for the government and foreign investors seeking to build resilient and sustainable infrastructure in Mexico?

A: Our message to clients is simple: Esri MX combines the best of both worlds. We have a local leadership team that deeply understands Mexico’s realities — its opportunities, its challenges, and the nuances of how things get done, while being fully backed by the innovation, scale, and best practices of Esri’s global network.

We are committed to becoming a strategic partner, rather than just a technology provider, focusing on integrating complementary technologies and specialized sectoral solutions. Furthermore, we are actively expanding our partner network, composed of Mexican companies, to co-create solutions for particular national challenges. For example, we work with a partner in the mining sector who understands the local regulatory and exploration challenges, adapting our tools to address the industry’s needs in Mexico. We also have partners specializing in public security, who understand the processes, visibility requirements, and operational flows of C5 centers, security agencies, and prosecutors' offices. 

Our vision is to build a collaborative network that connects global technology with national expertise, enabling Mexico to design and manage infrastructure that is not only smarter and more efficient but also more resilient and sustainable for the future.

Esri MX is the new, locally-led entity for Esri, the global market leader in Geographic Information System (GIS) software and location intelligence.