Satellites plus AI: How Planet Labs tracks change on Earth

From potential deforestation efforts to preventing tree branches from taking out power lines, there's a lot Planet Labs' satellites can spy from space. But it's too many images for one person to track. That's where AI comes in.

Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall (PL) tells Yahoo Finance how his company uses images to train its AI algorithms. "We've got this corpus of imagery... to train our algorithms so that you can do things like find any object around the Earth and backwards through time," Marshall explains. Marshall uses the company's project in Brazil, where Planet Labs' images and algorithms are used to detect new roads being built in the rainforest, a sign that there could be deforestation efforts to come.

Watch the video above to hear Marshall explain how companies will use Planet Labs' technology to track their carbon footprint.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Editor's note: This article was written by Stephanie Mikulich.

Video transcript

- When you talk about some of the work that you are doing, you build and manage a fleet of more than 200-- just around 200 satellites that are capturing images here on Earth, daily global change on Earth. When you talk about-- there's been so much hype around surrounding AI, how it is disrupting, how is revolutionizing. Across your industry, how do you see the advancements in AI impacting what you do?

WILL MARSHALL: Yeah, absolutely. Well, a huge amount. So AI is all about the data. Algorithms on their own are not worth anything. It's all about what data you train them on as to how useful they are to you. If you train them on the text of the internet, you can answer questions that you can find on the internet.

We've got this corpus of imagery, 2,500 images for every point on the Earth's landmass on average. So to train our algorithms so that-- you can do things like find any object around the Earth across and backwards through time. Let me give it a very specific example though to make it concrete. We work with the government of Brazil to track deforestation.

Now we produce millions of images all the time of Brazil. No one could look at all those images by hand and check if the difference between today and yesterday, if there's deforestation. So we have an automatic algorithm that's trained using machine learning that looks at all of the Brazilian Amazon and finds any new roads. If it finds a road, it's an early sign of people doing deforestation.

We then send them alerts every day of all the locations across the entire Brazilian Amazon for deforestation events. Last year alone, they did 3,000 interventions to go and arrest people or take equipment. They confiscated over $2 billion worth of equipment. And most importantly, they reduced deforestation rates by 55% in Brazil, leveraging our data.

So if you have a cooperative government and this sort of data set, you can have real impact on the world. So it's good business and it's good for the planet.

- So talk to us about the interconnectedness then of AI helping your business and also the impact on our climate and our planet. To what extent does the addition of AI help you in that effort?

WILL MARSHALL: Well, it's critical because, I mean, we use AI up and down the stack. But just to think about this-- in the next few years, every company on the planet and every country on the planet is going to have to balance its carbon books, is going to have to balance-- just like at the end of the year, you have to balance your financials, you have to balance your carbon books because we're going to need to-- we have to be a sustainable planet. We have to move to a sustainable economy. Well, the first step is how do you measure that stuff. And AI helps us measure that stuff like the deforestation example and many others.

- And real quick-- well, I want to get to two things with you. One-- you announced earlier today a new expanded contract with PG&E just in terms of the utility giant, what they're using your data set for. What exactly is that? Do you expect more of those types of contracts to come about here in the coming years?

And then when you talk about some announcement that you have on deck for tomorrow, you're launching a new platform. What can you tell us about that?

WILL MARSHALL: Yeah. That's very exciting. Well, with PG&E, it's an expanded partnership. We monitor millions of miles of their power lines for vegetative encroachment. So instead of having to send helicopters along their lines, we can tell them, well in advance, just using our satellite data-- and again, that uses algorithms to detect those tree encroachments. And then they only need to send people out where they need to rather than searching these long miles of lines. And that can stop wildfires, it can also help ensure electrical conductivity to the homes that they are serving.

And yes, tomorrow, we're launching a milestone launch of our platform. It's very exciting. It's a culmination of a lot of-- we did an acquisition last year. It's a culmination of platforms coming together. I won't spoil all the details.

But what I would say is that the goal is to help an ecosystem of partners to build on top of our data. We have all the data in there, but also some tools that enable them to build because customers don't want just data. They want solutions. But there are millions of different applications, vast array of applications, that are untapped with this new data set, all these images of the Earth.

And we can't possibly, as a planet, solve all of those challenges or help all those applications and serve them all ourselves. So we're trying to enable an ecosystem just like the App Store on Apple to enable people to build their own solutions on top of our data.

- Really exciting. Thank you so much for joining us and coming in the studio. We really appreciate it. Will Marshall, CEO of Planet Labs. Thank you so much--

WILL MARSHALL: Thanks very much.

- --for joining us.