On Day 1 of ILA 2026 in Berlin, the SpaceWatch.Global panel “From Pixel to Decision: When AI Agents Take Over Earth Observation” asked a question that is quickly becoming urgent — not just what we can observe, but how data becomes decisions, and who makes them. Rosa Schmidt, moderating her first panel for SpaceWatch.Global, was joined by Torsten Kriening and guest Daniel Seidel, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Berlin-based LiveEO.
Seidel argued that lasting value will lie less in hardware alone than in becoming the trusted infrastructure that AI agents call upon. He stressed that Earth observation keeps humans firmly in the loop: feedback cycles are long, ground truth must be validated in the real world, and in security-critical or defence settings a person must verify any recommendation — fully autonomous targeting is neither permitted nor desirable. Reflecting on a striking acceleration in agentic AI, he described agents as orchestrators that coordinate multiple models and methods, while cautioning that incomplete data and the ethics of acting on it demand care.
Turning to capability, Seidel detailed Twinspector, LiveEO’s bid to become Germany’s first operator of very-high-resolution satellite data, delivering 35 cm 3D stereo imagery from satellite pairs equipped with on-board GPUs, built along a largely European supply chain, with first launches planned from 2028.
On the bigger picture, he welcomed Europe’s growing defence-innovation tools while noting the continent’s hesitancy to award early commercial contracts. Citing ICEYE’s rise through government demand, he set out LiveEO’s ambition to write a comparable European success story — this time in the electro-optical and AI domain.
