Recently, ESRI has been making frequent moves in embracing AI. Most recently, they launched an AI assistant called AI Assistant on esri.com. I tried it out right away. Simply put, ESRI has trained its online help system into a knowledge base that allows users to ask questions in natural language, helping them find products, compare solutions, and get guidance on features. Here is a brief introduction.
About the ESRI AI Assistant
According to the official description, the AI Assistant is an AI helper embedded on esri.com. You can ask questions in natural language about Esri products, capabilities, and industry scenarios, and it will provide a reasonably clear answer along with relevant reference documentation.
You can access it here: https://www.esri.com/en-us/ai-assistant
In my experience, when asked questions like "What is the difference between Experience Builder and Web AppBuilder?" or "What ArcGIS products would be used for an urban renewal project?", it can tie together the product lines and focuses on answering questions about product portfolios and capabilities.
However, for specific practical issues such as ArcGIS error codes, it is of little help.
ESRI Has Launched More Than One AI Assistant
Since 2024, Esri has actually rolled out several AI assistants on its websites (you can tell they are in a hurry). In addition to the AI Assistant on esri.com described above, there is also the Esri Support AI Chatbot.
Address: https://support.esri.com/en-us/overview?nocache&chat-open=true
This assistant focuses mainly on specific technical support issues. For instance, the error codes mentioned earlier can get very detailed explanations here.
They also launched a Documentation Assistant.
It focuses on help documentation, but since my account does not have a subscription, I cannot try it out yet.
I cannot help but complain: ESRI is such a big company—why cannot they consolidate these into one? Having so many is a bit much...
AI in ArcGIS Pro
In fact, ESRI has been sparing no effort to integrate AI. For example, the geospatial foundation models mentioned in the previous article "ArcGIS Officially Launches Geospatial Foundation Models", and in smaller details, ArcGIS Pro has also been optimized, such as the semantic symbol search in ArcGIS Pro 3.7:
Summary
Although the newly launched assistants are a bit rough around the edges, it is clear that Esri is moving its entire product chain onto an AI foundation. The official website, Support, and documentation are incorporating AI assistants, while on the platform side, geospatial foundation models, MCP, and semantic symbol search are embedding analytical capabilities into ArcGIS. GIS + AI may indeed reshape how we use GIS, and the future is not far away.