A few days ago I wrote "ESRI Ramps Up AI Integration: New Assistants on esri.com - MalaGIS", complaining that Esri's official website, Support, and documentation sections are already crammed with multiple AI assistants. Not long after, the developer-documentation-focused Ask AI has gone live yet again. Since it targets developers, its main purpose is to let you ask questions in natural language, fetch answers from the official documentation, and provide links to the original sources.
Features of Ask AI
ArcGIS has so many SDKs, APIs and services that newcomers often do not even know which keywords to search for. The goal of Ask AI is to make the developer documentation more accessible. It currently supports natural-language questions, and according to the official statement all answers are grounded in Esri developer documentation. In theory this makes it more product-relevant than randomly asking a general-purpose large model and reduces AI hallucinations. It is said that this product took nearly two years from project initiation to public release (two years just to deliver a beta), driven by the combined efforts of the Developer Experience, AI Skills Framework, and Documentation Framework teams.
Shortcomings
First of all, Ask AI is still in beta. The official positioning is a context-aware documentation guide, not an all-powerful coding assistant that writes entire business applications or spits out long blocks of production-ready code. Second, hallucinations still exist. My own tests show that not every response is perfectly accurate, though there is a feedback mechanism at the bottom of each answer. My advice for now is not to trust it blindly; for critical APIs, authentication, and billing-related information, it is best to click through and verify against the original documentation.
I still want to grumble: is it really that difficult to consolidate these into a single entry point? They are scattered all over the place...
Comparison with Domestic GIS Vendors
Do Chinese GIS vendors have anything similar? I took a quick look and found that both SuperMap and MapGIS are working on something, but their positioning differs from Esri's Ask AI.
On the SuperMap side, starting from iDesktopX 2025 the desktop software includes a built-in AI assistant that provides three types of capabilities: intelligent Q&A, intelligent mapping, and intelligent modeling. However, it is more of an operation helper inside the desktop environment, and you have to configure the API endpoints and keys for models such as DeepSeek, Tongyi Qianwen, and OpenAI yourself before it can be used. There is also the AgentX Server spatial intelligent agent platform, which supports knowledge-base Q&A, RAG traceability, and MCP tool invocation, leaning more toward letting you build your own business and documentation assistants.
Since version 10.7, MapGIS has also been pushing geographic intelligent Q&A, knowledge-base Q&A, and agents that can connect to models like ChatGLM, DeepSeek, and Qwen. Its focus is more on industry assistants for fields such as natural resources and geology, as well as enabling users to build custom knowledge bases and agents within the platform.
Conclusion
Even though Esri may be offering a lot of these tools, at least they genuinely pay attention to such details, and I believe there will be further improvements down the road. I sincerely hope that the documentation of various domestic GIS platforms can draw some inspiration from this. Although general-purpose AI tools in China are already usable and can deliver decent results, as a user of Chinese GIS platforms, I feel these nuanced user-experience touches are also very much needed.