India, July 24 -- A farmer deciding when to irrigate a field, an insurance company assessing flood damage, and a city planner managing urban expansion may seem to operate in entirely different worlds. Yet they all depend on the same thing: accurate and timely information about what is happening on the ground.

For decades, obtaining that information relied on field surveys, manual inspections, local reporting, and other human-intensive processes. While effective in specific situations, these approaches are often slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. As climate events become more frequent, populations continue to grow, and economies become increasingly interconnected, organisations can no longer afford to make decisions based on incompl...