Scribble: An AI Agent for Web Mapping

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography

Jonathan Wagner, CEO of Scribble Maps, is back on the podcast, and this time we're talking about Scribble—an AI agent he's built into his platform. Not a chatbot, an agent. There's a difference, and we get into that.

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/the-business-of-web-maps/

So far, Scribble has access to 140 tools. It can view your map, select tools, build plugins, fetch data, and handle onboarding and customer education.

But here's the thing—should you care?

I think you should, because we're going to see more and more of these things. And whether you like it or not, for a lot of people, this is going to be the way they interact with geospatial data. I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle. I personally, I'm not entirely sure I would if I could.

Yeah, sure, there's a lot of uncertainty around what these things can do and how they're going to impact us. I get that. I feel it too. But we can't afford to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like it's not happening.

In this conversation, Jonathan walks through why he built Scribble (spoiler: his wife was expecting and he needed to solve an onboarding problem), the real risks of adding AI to your product, and the technical decisions behind using Gemini over OpenAI. We also talk about privacy concerns, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and what this all means for the future of GIS.

We touch on the QGIS MCP server, the democratization of mapping tools, and when maps aren't actually the answer. It's an honest look at where we are with AI agents in geospatial, from someone who's actually building one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

https://github.com/jjsantos01/qgis_mcp

How's that?