‘Location is the obvious way to connect data’: I spoke to Ordnance Survey CEO Nick Bolton on the challenges of turning a 225-year-old institution into an AI powerhouse

Originally established as an arm of the British military in 1791, the Ordnance Survey (OS) is one of the country’s most venerable institutions, with its orange-backed fold-out maps an integral part of family camping trips for many.

But as smartphones and satellites have increasingly encroached on the OS’ traditional areas, the company has been hard at work establishing itself as a vital part of national infrastructure - one that could have ramifications for years to come.

This of course, entails greater interaction of AI, so I spoke to the Ordnance Survey to find out just what this transformation looks like.

AI automation “This has been a technology business since day dot,” Nick Bolton, CEO at the Ordnance Survey, tells us, harking back to the early surveying days of theodolites and chains, where tools were constantly improved in order to out-do European competitors, “it’s always been technology that has enabled a better map.” Bolton points out that the OS has long been focused on using computer technology to improve its process, starting the transformation in the 1970s with plotter and digitiser tools to scan paper maps - which then had to be printed in more advanced ways than ever before.

The modern version of the OS is far more technical, and Bolton, whose background was in computer vision, highlights that the organization has been using AI technology for over a decade.

This began with implementing automatic feature extraction from aerial images, as the OS scans the whole of the nation every three years - the type of high-resolution image data, Bolton notes, that is ideal to train a neural network on.

“We’re at the high end of the market,” he notes, “everyone thinks AI is associated with large language models and transformer networks - actually, we all know that AI has been around for a hell of a lot longer than that.” “We see AI in the bracket of automation - more than a human replacement,” Bolton adds, noting that with Gen AI, having natural language conversations is “another obvious area we can apply AI to”.

Paper OS maps are a popular choice for walkers and hikers across the UK (Image credit: Getty Images) Agentic AI is a major interest of the OS going forward, as it looks to offer its huge cache of knowledge and data to partners, both in the public and private sector.