The Esri User Conference lands in San Diego July 13–17, and for utilities and asset-intensive organizations, the timing feels particularly loaded. The conversations on the expo floor this year aren’t theoretical; they’re coming from teams living through surging load demand, accelerating modernization timelines, and experienced staff retiring, taking institutional knowledge with them as they go. The stakes for trusted operational data have never been higher.
We’ll be at Booth #514. Here’s what we expect to be talking about.
Demand is growing faster than anyone modeled. Driven by data center expansion, EV adoption, and industrial electrification, while infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. Deloitte projects peak demand growth of roughly 26% by 2035. Grid reliability is tightening. Extreme weather is more frequent and more costly.
All that raises the stakes for data. When your GIS doesn’t match your asset management system, decisions get slower and riskier, exactly when you can least afford it. It’s why integration conversations feel different in 2026 than they did a year ago.
The shift from Geometric Network to Utility Network is underway for most utilities. The questions have moved from “should we?” to “how do we keep everything running while we do?”
If you’re mid-migration or planning one, we’d like to hear where you are.
AI is a central theme at this year’s conference: GeoAI, automated workflows, intelligent field dispatch. But AI requires clean, consistent data. The organizations hitting walls with AI initiatives are almost always hitting them in the same place: the underlying data doesn’t agree across systems.
When your GIS says an asset is in one state and your EAM says another, no algorithm fixes that. It just surfaces the inconsistency faster. Integration is increasingly where AI strategy either holds or falls apart.
MAS 9 is creating real urgency. The questions we hear most:
The answers depend on how the integration was built. If it’s custom code, the path is painful. If it’s a productized platform with managed connectors, the story is different. We’ve had this conversation enough times to help you think through it quickly.
SAP modernization programs are in motion across the sector. The GIS integration workstream is consistently one that gets less attention than it should — until it’s urgent.
Geonexus is SAP-certified for integration with RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and available on the SAP Store. If you’re in the planning stages of an S/4 migration, we’d rather talk now than six months before go-live.
Hyperscale data center demand is rewriting load forecasts in real time. Planning teams need their GIS to reflect what’s actually happening in the field, not what was recorded last week.
When GIS and systems of record fall out of sync, capital planning, capacity decisions, and interconnection queues all get harder. It sounds like a GIS problem. It’s usually an integration problem.
Workforce pressure is a defining challenge in 2026. Experienced professionals are retiring, and institutional knowledge often lives in the heads of a few people — or buried in custom code only two people can debug.
The organizations weathering this best have built on productized platforms where logic is configured, documented, and maintainable. We’d rather help you build something durable than help you patch something fragile.
At Esri UC 2026, we’re giving attendees a first look at the Geonexus Integration Cloud — GIC — our next-generation cloud-native platform being built for the spatial complexity asset-intensive organizations will face in the future described in this blog. This evolution of Geonexus’ integration strategy is built on customer and market feedback and will include innovative features such as a Visual integration designer. Event-driven architecture. Deployment flexibility across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid. AI-assisted experiences.
GIC is in early preview. GIP remains fully supported, actively sold, and trusted by more than 50 organizations running mission-critical integrations today. GIC doesn’t replace it — modernization with Geonexus is a journey you control.
Booth #514. We’ll be there all week — not to pitch, but to listen. The challenges utilities are navigating right now are real, and we’ve spent more than 16 years building the integration depth to help.
Book a private demo before you arrive: geo-nexus.com/esri-user-conference-2026
We would love to show you what our Geonexus Integration Platform can do for you and your team. Submit your information, and we’ll be in touch.
