Competition, page-4

Perhaps some people should watch Finola Burke's Q & A before shooting from the hip with baseless fear-mongering statements about competition.

If we were talking a couple of years ago, digital twins was a term that was just emerging. We didn't start life a s a digital twin business, we started as a cloud platform to solve workflow problems around point clouds, whether it's terrestrial laser scanning or aerial and mobile scanning. What we found is that the questions customers are trying to answer and the problems they're trying to solve using remote sensing data more often than not involve them using three foundational data types.

So, the design drawings or design plans that have been produced in a platform like AutoCAD. Then the imagery, so flat files that can also be turned into 3D imagery through the photogrammetry process for visualization by the eyeballs, and then obviously the LIDAR piece, the laser scanning and point cloud piece which is our DNA.

So the convergence of those three foundational data types into the digital twin platform, there are not many platforms out there, or desktop applications, that can scale with an open API infrastructure that can be rapidly integrated into an enterprise application like Pointerra3D can.

We've certainly had a competitive advantage and we've retained that with our core IP around point clouds, and the ability to visualize and analyze at scale and speed and accuracy. Having the ability to merge those three foundational data types into our version of the digital twin and then being able to rapidly integrate that into existing and future enterprise applications for our customers has really put us out in front of people who are talking about digital twins.

Of course one of the challenges with these newer phrases or terms is they mean different things to different people. We are certainly using AI. Our young software engineers who are coming to us out of University are versed in using even generative AI like ChatGPT to assist them in compiling code packs.

But our R&D team has been out at the edge of what's possible with LIDAR since we started the business, and our use of AI is embedded in our daily software engineering programs and our R&D.

What I would say though is when people think about AI more traditionally, or generally, such as ChatGPT, your generative AI, which is being able to query existing libraries of spoken word or written word and imagery, the ability to do that in the world of LIDAR and 3D data is really not something that is possible unless you've got a hell of a lot of data and done a hell of a lot of training.

We've got one of the world's largest multi-customer repositories of 3D data and we've been training or analytics, our programmatic code and human written analytics, and more recently our AI-enabled analytics for many years now.

So again, competition's great. We don't see anybody nipping at our heels. We certainly don't see anyone bringing a digital twin platform the way we have to market - cloud first, cloud born, cloud conceived, open API at either end and the ability to scale at extreme speeds to extreme scale almost on demand.

We're really confident that we're still out there with a big moat operating in a big wide blue ocean.