Introducing CARTO Site Selection AI Agent for Gemini Enterprise
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Did you know that opening a new McDonald’s branch costs over $2 million dollars? This cost isn’t uncommon, and makes choosing the right location for a new store, warehouse, or branch one of the most critical decisions a business can make. It's a high-stakes process that has traditionally required deep technical expertise, complex data analysis, and countless hours of manual work.
Today, that all changes. We are thrilled to announce the launch of the CARTO Site Selection AI Agent, our first AI Agent in Google's new Gemini Enterprise - the agentic platform designed to bring the full potential of Google’s AI to every employee. As the first in a planned suite of AI agents, this agent allows any user in your organization to solve complex geospatial challenges - regardless of their skill level.
The CARTO Site Selection AI Agent changes how enterprises analyze and select new commercial sites - turning complex spatial analytics into simple, natural-language conversations. Built within Google’s Gemini Enterprise, it empowers anyone - from expansion planners to business analysts - to make or analyze data-driven location decisions without needing to write code or run complex GIS tools.
For example, you can now simply ask questions like:
- “I’m looking to expand my business to Maryland state - can you help me identify the best locations?”
- “Can you compare these two potential sites against each other and my existing high performing stores?”
Behind the scenes, the agent performs advanced spatial analysis, combining multiple datasets and models to surface actionable insights. The agent is capable of performing two main forms of analysis:
- Direct Site Comparison: comparing specific sites and evaluating them against your most successful locations. This includes comparing the similarity of POIs and demographics, in order to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and ultimate suitability of each store.
- Market Discovery and Expansion Planning: identifying new high-potential markets for your businesses. This enables you to perform state-wide and regional searches to uncover your ideal markets based on commercial and demographic suitability.
All of these findings are ultimately shared through interactive maps, similarity rankings, and detailed reports to the user.
This analysis is fuelled by authoritative, detailed data sources, including:
- Google Maps Places Insights & Google Places Data - quantifies the business ecosystem and competitive landscape around each site.
- Google Population Dynamics Foundation Model - Adds predictive insight into lifestyle, behavior, and growth trends beyond static demographics.
Running CARTO Site Selection AI Agent within Google's Gemini Enterprise provides four key benefits:
- Seamless automation: The agent eliminates time-consuming manual processes, by automatically unifying multiple datasets into a single, actionable interface - reducing days of work into minutes.
- Democratized access: By removing the need for coding & GIS expertise, advanced geospatial analysis is no longer confined to technical teams; business users can now directly engage with data to find the answers they need.
- Unified & secure: CARTO Site Selection AI Agent operates seamlessly while your data never leaves the security of your Google Cloud environment.
- Greater geospatial analytics performance: Leverage scalable, parallel processing and compute with Google BigQuery. CARTO deployed natively within Google enables rapid analysis of massive geospatial datasets in seconds, avoiding the bottlenecks and limited performance common to legacy desktop GIS tools constrained by single-machine hardware.
Check it out in action below!
Every industry makes critical decisions about where to grow - whether opening new stores, optimizing distribution networks, or investing in new developments. With CARTO’s Site Selection AI Agent, these decisions are no longer guided by gut instinct or static spreadsheets, but by dynamic, data-driven insights.
Here’s how different sectors are already leveraging Location Intelligence to level-up their expansion strategies:
- Retail & CPG: identify untapped markets, forecast store revenue, and optimize product risk.
- Real estate: assess commercial viability, pinpoint ideal development locations, and identify undervalued markets.
- Logistics & supply chain: optimize your warehouse & fulfillment center network, improve fleet efficiency, and mitigate supply chain risks.
- Financial services: plan optimal branch & ATM placement, assess property risk & discover high potential markets.
Ready to see how our Site Selection AI Agent can modernize your expansion strategy? Try it here! This is just a glimpse into what can be achieved with CARTO’s Agentic GIS Platform - check it out in action below and get started with a demo from one of our experts!
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