Plenary Session 4 | Geospatial World Forum 2026 | Amsterdam, April 28 – May 1
This plenary session Moderate by Vaishali Dixit, VP – Americas, Geospatial World, brings together leaders from the space and geospatial sector to explore how satellite infrastructure is evolving into an on-demand, service-based model, and what that means for sovereignty, AI integration, and decision-making at a national and global scale.
Motoyuki Arai, CEO, Synspective, opens by outlining his company’s SAR satellite constellation and lays out a framework for understanding space infrastructure through three lenses: continuity, interoperability, and verifiability. He argues that as agentic AI becomes a new “end user” of satellite data, providers need open systems that keep humans in the decision-making loop while building toward sovereign, shared infrastructure among allied nations.
Anupam Anand, Joint Secretary, Department of Space, Government of India, IN-SPACe, details how IN-SPACe has opened India’s space sector to private enterprise since 2020, including liberalized FDI policy, public-private partnerships in earth observation, and the country’s ambitions to grow its space economy roughly fivefold over the next decade while expanding geospatial intelligence applications in agriculture, smart cities, and disaster resilience.
Milena Lerario, CEO, e-GEOS, discusses the shift from selling raw satellite data to delivering on-demand, decision-ready solutions, drawing on the company’s work with Copernicus, COSMO-SkyMed, and emergency response mapping, and previews the upcoming Leonardo constellation, which will process data onboard satellites via inter-satellite links.
Nicholas James Brown, Head of Office, UN Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence, delivers a sobering look at the “global geodetic supply chain”, the largely uncoordinated international system of ground observatories and analysis centers that keeps GPS, GNSS, and Earth observation satellites accurate. He warns that without better governance, awareness, and investment, satellite-dependent infrastructure across telecommunications, finance, and emergency services is at risk.
Vishal Thiruvedula, Vice President – Product, SatSure, closes the session by explaining how the company combines upstream satellite data, a geospatial AI foundation model, and downstream analytics to power agricultural lending, forestry compliance, and critical infrastructure monitoring across India and Southeast Asia.
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