Golden Insights: High-Quality Products Derived from Commercial Earth Observations

In 2024, CSIS released the Gold Rush: 2024 Commercial Remote Sensing Global Rankings report, which highlighted the best commercial remote sensing systems in operations across categories of electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), spectral, and thermal performance. Going beyond mere satellite collection systems, this new Golden Insights: High-Quality Products Derived from Earth Observation Data report showcases exactly what makes a derived product from Earth observation data valuable to decisionmakers and customers. The report dives into current customer buying centers, product categories, and metrics for evaluating one commercial product versus another in delivering customer value.  

Markets for Earth observation are shifting from buying Earth observation data to buying derived insights, thanks largely to the increase in multi-source remote sensing data and new artificial intelligence tools which can extract the right information at speed and scale. Customers across diverse market sectors, who may have never used Earth observation data before, can now improve their market readiness, business relevance, and recurring revenues with decision-ready products from commercial remote sensing. This report is a primer to assist both producers and consumers with a common language for describing derived products and unmet information needs in way that will increase customer satisfaction and promote faster growth across the sector.

This report is made possible by general support to CSIS. No direct sponsorship contributed to this report.