At the Taylor Geospatial Institute, our role is to make that kind of progress possible: bringing together the right expertise, the right tools, and the right partnerships. This work reflects what’s possible when we combine new tools with a shared sense of purpose and remain focused on delivering advantage where it matters most.

The Taylor Geospatial Institute thanks Amazon Web Services for their partnership and the participating teams for their creativity and commitment. This report reflects the shared effort to advance generative AI for geospatial applications in service of the public good.

In 2024, TGI and AWS launched the Generative AI for Geospatial Challenge — a first-of-its-kind national initiative to explore and expand “the art of the possible” in AI-powered geospatial problem-solving. Designed to catalyze experimentation, surface scalable ideas, and accelerate impact, the challenge opened the door to a diverse collection of participants and use cases. Their work offers a window into what generative AI can enable today — and what it may unlock tomorrow.

A total of twelve winning teams, drawn from TGI consortium institutions, commercial partners in the St Louis region, and experts from across the global community, were awarded a total of $1 million in AWS credits by a joint TGI-AWS review committee. Their projects applied generative AI techniques — ranging from large language models (LLMs) to diffusion models, multimodal tools, or novel architectures — to real-world geospatial challenges. Over four intensive months of work, teams designed, developed and demonstrated minimum viable products (MVPs). The result: a diverse portfolio of early-stage, deployable solutions that span sectors, technologies, and use cases.