Location intelligence is data and software that describe what every place is like, street by street: which shops are there, how many people pass by, who lives and works nearby, and what they spend. Retailers, restaurant chains and consumer brands use it to decide where to open a shop, and what to stock in each one. Some sellers call their product a digital atlas, a digital twin of places.
Where does the data come from? The streets and the list of shops and offices come from a digital map. Counts of people passing each place, called footfall, come from phone location data. These counts are pooled and anonymised, so that no single person can be identified, as India's data protection law requires. Census and survey data add the number of households and their income. Sales data from retail measurement shows what sells in each area. Geospatial AI adds more, for example by reading shop signs in street photographs.
The software combines all of this into small cells, such as squares of 100 metres on each side. Each cell gets a profile: its population, its footfall by hour, its competing shops and its spending. A model then learns from the company's existing shops. It finds which features of a cell match a shop's sales, and it predicts the sales of a new shop in any other cell.
Consider a footwear chain with 120 shops in north and west India that wants to open three shops in Pune. Its team has a shortlist of eight sites. For each site, the software shows the number of shoe shops within 1 km, the number of people who pass on weekday evenings and on weekends, the share of nearby households in the chain's target income group, and the number of offices and colleges within a 15-minute walk. The model, trained on the chain's 120 shops, predicts monthly sales for each site, from ₹9 lakh at the weakest site to ₹22 lakh at the strongest. The chain picks the top three. It stocks more sports shoes in the shop near the colleges, and more formal shoes and sandals in the shop in an older market.
The same profiles help brands decide which shops should stock a new product, and help banks and telecom companies choose where to open branches and stores. Location-based advertising uses similar place data to show ads to people near a chosen place.
Location intelligence differs from a geographic information system (GIS). A GIS is a general tool for analysing any data by place. Location intelligence is ready-made data about places, with a model for one kind of decision. Many companies load it into their GIS. It is a form of data as a service.