Brett Bundock, Group Managing Director, Esri Australia | The CEO Magazine

A friend of Brett Bundock’s was considering buying a couple of grocery stores. On paper, the opportunity looked promising. The broker had reviewed the historical trade and ran the numbers. But Bundock wanted to know something else: Where were they?

More specifically, what did the catchment areas look like? Who lived nearby? And did the location of each store suggest that what had worked in the past would continue to work in the future?

“That kind of questioning hadn’t been done,” Bundock tells The CEO Magazine.

“It’s absolutely pertinent to the catchments for stores, but it wasn’t being asked by the broker or advisor to the person making the investment.

“I’m a geographer by training, so asking ‘where?’ comes naturally to me. But it doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everyone. That’s what we’re trying to change at Esri. Ask ‘where?’ early, understand it, and then use location to give every decision more context.”

After more than three decades in Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, Bundock knows how much this single piece of context can change the picture, especially in a landscape like today’s, which is completely awash in data.

As Group Managing Director of Esri Australia and Boustead Geospatial – a role that also spans Singapore, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea and Brunei – Bundock is on a mission to have more people asking ‘where’ before making the big decisions.

“Geospatial and location have been lurking in the background,” he explains. “But business leaders need to bring them front and center where decisions are being made at the highest level all the way down to operational levels, because it has something to contribute to a whole spectrum of decisions.

“That’s what we’re really trying to drive now – getting the location component considered very early in the decision-making process, rather than being treated as an afterthought.”

From backroom to boardroom

When Bundock started out as a GIS research officer, the industry, he says, was still simply trying to prove geospatial’s worth.

“We were doing proof of concepts and proof of value to see whether geospatial actually made sense and if we could get value from it,” he recalls.

At the time, it was considered specialist technology, generally only understood and used exclusively by specialist teams. Across the years, this has changed dramatically.

“Over 20 years, geospatial has evolved from being a very niche backroom function to a strategic capability that companies now need to be successful,” Bundock explains.

Esri Australia has been a leader in that evolution for more than four decades. As the exclusive local distributor of Esri’s ArcGIS platform, it works across government and the commercial sector, with its technology used to understand everything from infrastructure and assets to communities, investment and the environment.

And while GIS has become infinitely more sophisticated, the reason organizations need it is surprisingly straightforward.

“The environment people need to make decisions in right now is very complex,” Bundock points out. “There’s so much data coming in all of the time, and organizations need a way to make sense of it – location can help.”

Indeed, even though there’s arguably more information available to leaders than ever before, more data doesn’t automatically mean better decision-making. Often, it means the opposite.

Bundock gives the example of an asset management system. It might be able to calculate which assets are likely to fail, but that prediction only tells part of the story.

“Location brings that extra dimension to decision-making,” he explains. “It helps to make sense out of complexity.”

Knowing where an asset is likely to fail can reveal who or what will be affected, what else is nearby and how urgently an organization needs to respond.

Apply the same thinking to customers, stores, infrastructure, supply chains or communities and the possibilities multiply quickly.

“What pulls everything together? It’s the ‘where’ component,” he insists. “Where is this happening? Where are my assets? Where do I need to do this? Who did that and where are they?”

Building trust with AI

Bundock believes AI has only raised the stakes. After the initial rush to experiment with the technology, organizations are now reaching a point where their excitement has to translate into something more tangible.

“We’ve gotten to the stage where people are trying to morph their AI aspirations into measurable outcomes,” he says.

But measurable outcomes require trust. And AI, as Bundock points out, has no shortage of confidence.

“AI will confidently give you a response,” he says. “It’s always very certain. But how can you actually trust that?”

It is a question every business investing heavily in AI now needs to answer.

Importantly, they also need to understand not only their data but the metadata surrounding it – when it was captured, its accuracy and what it genuinely represents.

Much of Esri’s work then is focused on helping clients turn trusted location information into a foundation their AI models can use.

“We’re working with customers to say, ‘OK, how do we take that trusted, authentic data and feed it into your AI models, grounding them so you can actually trust what comes out?’” he says.

Trusted data is only one part of the equation – the other is access. Bundock sees a huge opportunity in bringing location intelligence into the technology ecosystems people are already using.

“Until you bring that capability to where people are, it’s not democratized,” he says plainly.

“IT companies have historically wanted to own your whole world. But that’s really moved on now.”

Today, customers are building their businesses across ecosystems of specialist technologies rather than relying on a single provider to do everything. The question, then, is how those capabilities work together.

An organization might use Microsoft for productivity, Autodesk for computer-aided design and Amazon Web Services for cloud services. Rather than competing to displace any capabilities in those platforms, Esri is focused on making location intelligence work seamlessly alongside them.

“As part of the broader IT ecosystem, we’re looking at how we can make it really easy for users to get access to our services when and how they need them,” he says.

“For example, if they’re in Microsoft Copilot, then let’s get location into that so that they can use it.”

In his view, the easier these connections become, the less GIS needs to feel like a specialist tool at all. Location intelligence simply becomes another capability available at the moment a decision is being made.

Driven by outcomes

This integrated approach mirrors another evolution taking place inside Esri Australia – the way it works with customers.

“Our foundations have always been built on deep technical expertise,” Bundock explains.

“As our clients increasingly look to us not only for technology, but also for guidance, insight and context, we’re continuing to strengthen the ways we share that expertise and help customers apply it to their most important challenges.”

However, he insists the goal is not about changing who the organization is. Rather, it is about ensuring clients can fully benefit from the exceptional knowledge and experience that already exists across the business.

“We have incredibly capable technical teams,” he says.

“The opportunity is to make that expertise even more accessible and relevant to our clients by combining deep technical knowledge with a strong understanding of customer priorities and business outcomes.”

Some of that comes through professional development and coaching. Some comes from creating more opportunities for collaboration across teams and disciplines, allowing people to learn from different experiences and perspectives.

“Technical expertise remains fundamental to our success,” Bundock says.

“Alongside that, skills such as communication, collaboration and customer engagement help us translate expertise into practical value for our customers and build stronger long-term relationships.”

Challenge accepted

With around 700 people across the Group, keeping the workforce moving with the market is an ongoing job. And standing still isn’t really an option. Luckily for Bundock, who is approaching his 20th anniversary as Managing Director at Esri Australia this year, comfort isn’t the goal.

His career began on a help desk before moving into sales, where he developed what he calls a kind of “controlled paranoia”. Naturally, some of that mentality found its way into his leadership.

“If the clients aren’t talking to you, they’re talking to somebody else,” he says.

“I’m never comfortable when things are smooth because they can turn around and change so quickly,” he acknowledges. “You have to be ready to adapt.”

This mindset helps to explain an annual habit Bundock’s picked up.

“I sit down on the first working day of the new calendar year and go, ‘Right, I’ve just been appointed to this job,” he says. “I’ve got everything to prove and everything to lose.’”

After so long in the role, it might sound like an exercise in imagination. But he argues that it’s actually fairly close to reality.

“Our organization fundamentally changes every two to three years,” he explains. “So I’m essentially managing and leading in a completely different company to what I was two or three years ago.

“And that’s lots and lots of fun,” he adds, with a grin.

Bundock’s own remit has expanded along the way. After initially leading in Australia, he spent time living and working in Indonesia and Malaysia – experiences that changed the way he thinks about running a regional business.

He’s certain that a strategy that works in Australia cannot simply be dropped into another market and be expected to produce the same result.

“While we can provide a lot of centralized capability from inside of Australia, it’s up to the locals to take that framework and implement it in a way that makes sense for them in their region,” he explains.

The same openness applies closer to home. Bundock says he actively seeks out people who will question him and open his eyes to new perspectives.

“I like having people around who challenge me and bring contemporary thinking and fresh ideas,” Bundock reveals.

He expects the wider organization to question itself too. In a recent message to employees, Bundock encouraged them to examine processes, outputs and deliverables rather than continue doing something simply because it has always been done that way.

“Is that really best practice? Does it provide the value to our client that they want and need?” he says.

The bigger picture

The payoff for all this change becomes clearest when Bundock talks about what comes next.

Australia’s housing shortage is one example. The planning process can slow development, increase costs and weigh on productivity. It is an enormous problem involving government, infrastructure, regulation, communities and developers.

But Bundock sees another dimension running through it.

“Where are we going to put these houses?” he asks. “We feel this could more clearly link back to geospatial – how can we best identify the vacant land and its surrounding infrastructure to make land development decisions super practical, cost efficient and more informed?”

Those questions are already supported by years of spatial information. Add AI and cloud computing, and Bundock sees the potential to interrogate that information faster and help decision-makers find better answers to problems that have resisted them for years.

“I get really excited with what AI combined with geospatial and cloud computing can do in solving some of the big problems,” he says. “It breaks down the complexity, giving people a much better trusted context to make decisions around.”

It’s also why he wants the geospatial industry to get better at telling its own story. The technology matters, of course. But Bundock is far more interested in what somebody can do with it.

“What I’m really keen to do is have our industry tell the story of the value we bring in a way that resonates with people, rather than just being technology and another ‘bright shiny thing’ – so that we are articulating the ‘so what’ of location all the time,” he says.

As organizations confront problems that resist simple answers, this ‘so what’ is increasingly significant.

Where should infrastructure investments go? Which communities are most exposed to a particular risk? Where should a retailer expand? Which assets require attention first? Where is housing development viable? How can emergency services allocate resources more effectively? Where are customers, opportunities and vulnerabilities changing?

After decades spent asking the question himself, Bundock’s advice to leaders is simple: “Every time you make a decision, ask yourself: where, where, where?”