The DAIS 2026 Speaker Spotlight is a series where we hand the mic to the speakers heading to Data + AI Summit and let them answer five short questions — in their own voice, no press-release polish.
Below, Kent Marten on the spatial layer hiding inside almost every dataset — and why the Agentic era is the moment geospatial finally becomes a first-class citizen of the Lakehouse. Lightly edited for length — otherwise, the words are his.
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Spatial used to demand mastery over a wall of specialist tools. Genie Code and AI agents have become the vehicle for truly democratizing geospatial intelligence.
— Kent Marten
The topic
What is your talk about, and who is it for?
How customers are using Databricks for geospatial data processing and analysis. If you work with location data — in any form, at any scale — this session is for you.
Why this, why now
What's changed in the last 6–12 months that makes this topic urgent right now?
The majority of customers across every industry have a spatial component to their data, and a spatial context to real business questions — they just haven't always been able to act on it. Working with geospatial data has never been easier now that we're in the Agentic era. Genie Code can build complex spatial pipelines with a single prompt.
The personal stake
Why are you the person giving this talk?
I've spent my career building GIS and Business Intelligence tools to make sense of the physical world. I've helped build every geospatial feature in Databricks — including Spatial SQL, H3, geo data types, and map visualizations. This talk comes from being inside the work, not next to it.
What you'll leave with
What will someone be able to do on Monday morning that they couldn't do before?
You'll leave with a clear picture of what we're building in the geospatial space, why we're building it, how it maps to the use cases you're already trying to solve — and what's coming next. Enough to walk back to your team and start moving.
The bigger picture
How does this fit into where Databricks — and data and AI more broadly — is heading?
Geospatial data is now first class across the open Lakehouse ecosystem. Spatial data science and data engineering used to require a certain level of mastery over a collection of geospatial tools; now Genie Code and AI agents have become the vehicle for truly democratizing geospatial intelligence — so a question with a location inside it can be answered by anyone, not just the specialist down the hall.
Part of the DAIS 2026 Speaker Spotlight series — more voices dropping in the weeks ahead. Got a DAIS speaker you'd love to hear from next? Mention them in the comments — we're always listening.
