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Google has unveiled a new set of generative AI capabilities for its mapping and geospatial product suite, targeting enterprise and developer use cases with advanced visualisation and analytics tools. The announcements were made during Cloud Next in Las Vegas this week, where the company highlighted how AI is being embedded deeper into its mapping ecosystem to enhance decision-making and simulation workflows.

One of the most notable additions is a feature called Maps Imagery Grounding, which allows enterprise customers to use generative AI to create realistic visual environments within Google Street View. This enables users to simulate real-world scenarios such as film production planning, construction site visualisation, and infrastructure modelling. By simply entering a prompt into the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, users can generate contextualised Street View scenes, provided the necessary settings are enabled in Google Maps Imager.

"In seconds, you can storyboard your creative vision with an accurate image — and you can even use Google to animate the sce "e," the company said in its official press release.

Alongside visual generation, Google is also expanding analytical capabilities within Google Earth. A new tool called Aerial and Satellite Insights allows users to process and analyse aerial imagery stored in Google Cloud's BigQuery, the cloud-based data warehouse and analytics engine. According to the company, this significantly reduces what previously required weeks of work into just a few minutes of computation and analysis.

BigQuery now acts as a central hub for processing satellite datasets, enabling faster extraction of insights from large-scale geospatial data.

The company is also introducing two new Earth AI Imagery models designed specifically for geospatial intelligence tasks. These AI systems are trained to detect and classify objects in satellite and aerial imagery, including infrastructure elements such as bridges, roads, and power lines. Previously, organisations had to train custom AI models for these tasks, a process that could take several months and significant computational resources. Google says the new models eliminate that requirement, allowing businesses to accelerate development cycles for geospatial applications.

The Earth AI ecosystem is already being adopted by partners such as Airbus and Boston Children's Hospital, who are using the platform for applications ranging from environmental monitoring to disaster response and healthcare logistics planning.

"These AI updates unlock entirely new possibilities for businesses, data analysts, and urban planners," the company said in its release, emphasising generative AI's role in transforming how spatial data is interpreted and used across industries.

The broader initiative reflects Google's ongoing push to position its geospatial and mapping technologies as foundational tools for enterprise AI adoption, combining real-world imagery, cloud-scale computation, and generative models into a unified ecosystem.