In an industry where data is currency, location data has emerged as one of the most valuable assets an enterprise can possess. That’s the conviction driving the latest chapter of collaboration between HERE Technologies and Esri, a partnership that stretches back over two decades but is now entering what both sides describe as its most consequential phase. HERE is an Amsterdam-based mapping and location data company whose maps, traffic feeds, and geocoding sit behind a large share of the world’s in-car navigation systems.
We connected with Chris Handley, HERE’s senior vice president of project management, to talk about what the expanded partnership means for geospatial professionals and why he thinks location data deserves its own seat in enterprise IT strategy. Handley has spent his career at the intersection of telecommunications, machine learning, and location intelligence. He led the machine learning division at Ericsson and served as chief product officer at Inrix before joining HERE five years ago, with earlier stints at Microsoft, AT&T, and Vodafone, always with a location-focused lens.
A New Vision for Location Data
At the heart of the renewed partnership is a simple but powerful realization that the traditional relationship between data provider and customer ends too soon. Under current business models, HERE delivers products and services through APIs or file transfers, and then the relationship stops. However, the data behind those deliveries holds far more value than a single transaction can capture.
The vision is to persist that data behind visualization and analytics engines, making it accessible not just to the platforms consuming the API, but to financial controllers, operations teams, product managers, and executives seeking decision support, insights, and root-cause analysis. Esri’s ArcGIS platform, which HERE considers best-in-class for these capabilities, will serve as the vehicle for that expanded reach.
Location Data Deserves Its Department
HERE’s leadership argues that location data is not just another dataset; it deserves recognition as a distinct discipline within every enterprise’s IT strategy. It’s difficult to find a business that doesn’t have some need for location data, yet extracting its full value requires turning raw information into what the team calls a “so what”, an insight or capability that drives action.
That means equipping organizations with the platforms and skill sets to work with historical location data. An operations manager investigating an issue can query historical datasets for root causes. Financial teams can visualize location data over time to manage spend and ensure utilization. When location data is depicted on a map and analyzed as a time series, focused on specific geographic areas like a warehouse, insights emerge that would otherwise remain invisible.
Teaching Machines to Read Maps
Perhaps the most ambitious dimension of the partnership is the challenge of making geospatial data accessible to artificial intelligence. Maps were designed as a two-dimensional representation of the real world, something humans can interpret intuitively. AI doesn’t have that context.
Early assumptions that knowledge graphs, annotated datasets, and vector queries would be enough proved insufficient. AI hasn’t been trained on these services. Real-time traffic data can be made available, but AI doesn’t know what to do with it. The cost of training models on massive geospatial datasets drives enormous token usage and compute cycles, making comprehensive training prohibitive.
HERE’s answer is a location reasoning layer, an intermediary that allows AI to interpret location data without requiring the full burden of model training. The partnership with Esri aims to apply this method to GIS data, making it easier to use detailed geospatial information in AI workflows without the expensive adjustments that would usually be needed.
What’s Driving the Industry Shift
As data strategies mature, organizations increasingly recognize location as a key metric and sometimes even use it as a primary key for structuring their data. The drivers include efficiency in query design, the rise of agentic workflows that access data autonomously, and the fact that location-anchored data supports an expanding range of use cases across industries.
A key strategic goal for the two companies is bringing Esri’s capabilities to non-GIS users. HERE customers working with traffic data, vehicle maneuvers, EV charging datasets, and autonomous vehicle information stand to benefit from visualization and analytics tools that were previously the domain of GIS specialists. For Esri, it extends their software’s reach into a broader customer base. For HERE, it means leveraging best-in-class capabilities without reinventing them.
AI as Disruption and Opportunity
When asked what excites Handley the most, the answer was immediate: AI. Drawing on the familiar technology hype cycle, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, he observed that in AI, all those phases are happening simultaneously. Real-world value is already being driven, corporate business models are being fundamentally reshaped in very short timeframes, and how it all consolidates remains unknown.
The companies that can be the most agile and adaptable will be the ones that succeed. For HERE, that means every day brings something new, not the same old product line, not the same old business. It’s a disruption, yes, but also an enormous opportunity, and one that the HERE-Esri partnership is positioned to help the geospatial industry seize.
