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This week on SHIFT
Almost every image we have of the planet comes from satellites or cameras bolted to airplanes. This week's episode from the SHIFT archive follows a company taking a very different approach: a decentralized network of everyday drone pilots capturing the Earth at higher resolution, far more often, and for a fraction of the cost. Jennifer heads out to fly one herself.
Her guides are Alec Wilson and Bill Lakeland, the COO and CEO of Spexi. Wilson is a former helicopter pilot who logged thousands of hours over Vancouver; Lakeland has spent two decades in aerial mapping. Some of what you've seen in Google Earth came off his planes. Together they explain how the network actually works, and the surprising fact that the U.S. is one of the harder places to run it.
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Three things to listen for
1. The planet, sliced into hexagons.
Spexi divides the Earth into hexagons so the capture process is identical everywhere on the map. A pilot taps a nearby hex, hits fly, and the drone climbs to about 80 meters and shoots a standardized set of images autonomously, at roughly seven minutes per hex, then the pilot moves to the next one and gets paid per successful flight.
2. A crowd-sourced base layer for spatial AI.
At the time of the taping, around 4,000 pilots across nearly 200 North American cities, with more than double that on the waitlist, were building what Lakeland calls a geospatial cousin of a large language model: a consistent, reliable data layer of the planet that AI systems can align to and query. Blockchain shows up here not as hype but to prove the decentralized data hasn't been tampered with.
3. Detailed enough to matter, capped for privacy.
The sub-250-gram drones fly under 300 feet and capture detail that satellites and planes can miss. But the imagery is deliberately held below the resolution where it could pick out faces or license plates. It’s a privacy ceiling built into the system by design, not a technical limit.
One to watch: Next week at Esri’s International User Conference in San Diego, the company is rolling out geospatial AI capabilities across their product portfolio.
Listen now
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