Smarter Infrastructure Planning with Utility Intelligence

Kaustabh Page, Senior Product Director at 4M, sat down with me recently for an episode of “Convos with Chris.” We discussed the core principles guiding his product decisions and how those principles shape everything from the user interface to the data validation process of 4M’s Utility AI platform. 

In this episode, he outlines the current challenges with traditional utility mapping methods, including fragmented and unreliable data, and how 4M’s new Utility Insights Dashboard—powered by 4M Agent—is taking our utility mapping product to a whole new level. 

We also dig into his thoughts about how transparency matters in the utility space to build customer trust, how he approaches the product roadmap based on customer feedback, and what’s needed to future-proof the US’s infrastructure, which ASCE rated a C in their 2025 report card. In this conversation, Kaustabh breaks down exactly how we’re re-shaping the future of utility mapping — and what’s ahead for the future of 4M.  

Read on for a summary of Kaustabh’s insights, and watch the full episode below. 

Growing Challenges: Utility Investigations and Infrastructure Planning 

Infrastructure in the US has its own unique set of challenges. Unlike in Europe, where infrastructure has been built over the existing infrastructure for centuries, in the US we started with lots of open space and no existing infrastructure. Utilities didn’t have a lack of land, so they just installed them where they were needed. 

While this made construction easy, it also led to a lack of good documentation. And when US cities started becoming more and more dense, tracking down the little breadcrumbs of incomplete documentation started to cause significant problems when planning for any construction project. 

And the problem isn’t just finding the data — it’s compiling such a large data set together and making sense of it. 

This problem would take probably 50-60 years to solve with conventional utility mapping software. But with utility AI mapping? We’re already building a platform with the ability to discover millions of data points, collect them, and make sense of them, with just a few clicks. 

How 4M’s Utility AI Platform Analyzes Data at Scale

‍4M’s research and engineering team has figured out a way to build the AI so it understands not just what the data says, but also which data points to trust more. 

Let’s say we find two GIS data sources. Both of them have some sort of map, but one GIS system is distorted or 20 feet away from what the other one shows. 

How do you figure out which one is right? That’s where 4M’s AI engine relies on more data sources, like view prints, on satellite imagery. And then the AI sees that this is a conflict where two data sources are pointing in two different directions — it needs more validation before confidently determining the probable location of the line.  

So it looks at other data points, validates the data as much as it can, and then it makes an informed decision. It’s doing more than just conflating all the data points, it’s also evaluating them and generating its own proprietary 4M data. 

And that’s at scale too — thinking about how long that would take a human or manual approach, it’s almost incomprehensible. It sounds too good to be true, except that we’re releasing a new state every month and it’s just becoming faster and faster. The AI is constantly learning from the data it’s already seen, so every time it analyzes a new information source — like the location of a utility line or a conflict between sources — it gets better at recognizing patterns, spotting inconsistencies, and predicting outcomes. 

Kaustabh’s Product Philosophy: Being Customer-Obsessed 

To be a great product manager, you have to fall in love with the problem. And you also have to listen really actively to customer pain points. Whether that means listening to early sales interactions or customer success interactions to listen to them and ask them questions, that’s like oxygen for a product manager. 

And if their feedback is telling you that your product roadmap is not going to solve their most urgent pain points, you might need roadmap alignment or readjustment. 

Right now, for example, a pressing problem for 4M customers is the ability to generate a utility conflict matrix, so we’ve recently pivoted to focusing on that and being a servant to our users.  

All Utilities. One Intuitive Map.

Part of the beauty of our product is how simple it is to use. 

It’s like Google Maps, which has been around awhile, and it’s extremely powerful. But even as powerful as it is, it takes me literally two seconds just to open the app and put in an address and navigate there. It’s a super-intuitive interface. They’re added so many new features, but they haven’t taken away that usability part. 

Balancing all the power of 4M and all our new features, but ensuring it’s simple and user-friendly and able to fit into everybody’s workflow seamlessly, is a priority. So we at 4M are constantly striving to keep that as a founding principle for us. Our first time-to-data should be instant, right? There should not be 15 clicks someone has to go through or wait for a tremendous amount of time to get to that first level of data.

But as the product evolves and gets even more sophisticated, that becomes harder. How do you land the users into the most simplistic product but also have ways to introduce all these complex workflows, like utility routing or road routing in the future?

The way I’m seeing the product evolving, I think we should be able to maintain that simplicity, with the workflows as a kind of secondary layer. Data will be the primary shining star, always instantly available. 

Building Future-Proof Infrastructure

A hot topic in the construction industry in general right now is how we’re going to future-proof the country’s infrastructure. There are lots of headwinds against us, like extreme weather and a supply shortage of skilled labor. But there’s also a lot of demand from things like the bipartisan infrastructure law injecting funds into the country to upgrade our infrastructure. 

So how do you design a product that not only addresses today’s challenges, but stays ahead of them for the future? And a roadmap that keeps pace with these evolving technology and customer demands? 

We can’t replace engineers, for example, but we can give them the tools to have all the data at their fingertips so they’re not wasting time in mundane tasks like five days of record research. 

And for the future of the product, we could build AI co-pilots or AI to assist with the workflows in the user space. Right now when the customers get the data from 4M, they’re either evaluating it on our map or taking it to another GIS or CAD platform and trying to synthesize and analyze the data in that platform and then make decisions. 

Our product vision is how we can help our users to look at the data, start asking questions within our product, get meaningful answers and analysis and shorten their time to making those decisions. That’s our core product future principle. 

We’re taking the product to a place where it accelerates decision-making, and accelerates speed-to-value. 

Trust and Data Transparency 

The data still contains unknowns and uncertainty, and we’re transparent about that with users. For example, we’ll identify a region where a few utility owners are located, and we don’t know where their lines are, and we’ll be transparent about that. 

We’ll say that we know in this area they’re interested in, that based on the data our AI engine has collected there’s a communication line by Optimum, but we don’t know the exact location of that. And this is where we ask users to go and do further investigation, but it also becomes a very good starting point for them to plan activities like conceptual planning, bidding, or QA/QC for the field. 

They take the map, they go on the field, and they know how many objects they need to go and verify. They also, many times, identify the locations where a test hole might be required to look at the utility depths in a specific area. 

This is where our users trust us saying, ok there are situations where you’ll surface more information. That’s very valuable in the case of scenarios like a missed gas line, which is a safety issue when it goes to construction, or fiber optic lines which are expensive to repair. 

We act as a kind of added insurance policy in the field QA/QC workflows. It’s a good starting point but it’s not going to be 100%, and it’s important for customer trust that we’re completely transparent about those situations. 

Utility Insights Powered by 4M Agent

Now that we’ve built a a reliable base utility map with our Foundation Data, we’ve evolved the product even further with our Utility Insights Dashboard powered by 4M Agent.

The interactive dashboard gives you a comprehensive view of utility-related risks, helping you proactively assess potential conflicts and reduce project delays. By analyzing utility line locations, ROW, parcel zoning, and crossings, our tool flags risks and lets you interact with your data by clicking on the map to explore key areas of concern.

Looking Ahead

Fast-forward 10 years, and we’ll be the central connected utility platform for everything that’s related to utilities. 

The way I see our product evolving is that our data sets become more mature and more accurate. I also see us consuming a lot of the feedback from field, meaning that when a new line gets constructed, we instantly get notification of that line’s coordinates and metadata. We become this central repository and have connections not just from publicly available information, but also drone data, videos collected by autonomous cars while they’re driving about features on the road, markings, and new construction. 

So the future I see is we’re processing a lot more data sources, like a million more, and generating even more comprehensive and up-to-date information — if a line was installed yesterday, it’s in our platform within a matter of hours. 

We’ll also support the entire construction lifecycle. Currently, our focus is on the planning, design, and pre-construction stages. But I see us evolving into construction and all the way to the asset maintenance phase as we go forward. 

Ready to build smarter, faster, safer infrastructure with the power of Utility AI Mapping? Let’s talk. 

Schedule time with our experts to see how 4M can help you replace manual utility investigations with instant, reliable utility data you can trust and verify at every stage of planning, design, and pre-construction. Book a demo.