From Geospatial Data to KITT: Aaron Morris on AI, Infrastructure and Innovation

Woolpert may be more than a century old, but in Pittsburgh, its story feels anything but old. In a Fireside Chat, Aaron Morris, Woolpert’s Head of AI, pulled back the curtain on a company that blends architecture, engineering, and geospatial expertise into something that feels increasingly essential to the modern world: using data, automation, and AI to better understand the physical environment around us.

For Morris, that mission is personal and deeply practical. Long before leading AI across Woolpert’s global operations, he built his reputation in robotics and autonomous systems, including at Pittsburgh startup Allvision, which was later acquired by Woolpert. That move did more than bring a promising technology team into a larger company. It helped establish Pittsburgh as a key innovation hub for Woolpert, a firm with thousands of employees, dozens of offices, and projects that stretch across five continents.

What makes the fit so compelling is Woolpert’s unusual blend of scale and specificity. Morris described a business where AI is not treated like stage magic or a buzzword sprinkled over PowerPoint slides. Instead, it is built into workflows that help engineers, surveyors, and geospatial experts make sense of enormous amounts of data. Whether the task involves analyzing roadside infrastructure, managing vegetation near utilities, improving elevation models, or monitoring land conditions around critical assets such as pipelines, the goal is the same: turn mountains of raw information into useful insight.

Morris offered a refreshing dose of realism about AI’s role in that process. At Woolpert, humans stay in the loop. The technology may help flag issues, recommend changes, and accelerate tedious review work, but it is still people who guide the outcome and ensure quality. That mindset feels especially important in fields where the stakes are measured in safety, infrastructure reliability, and public trust. In Morris’s telling, AI is not a replacement for expertise. It is an amplifier for it.

And then, just when the conversation seemed fully grounded in digital twins, geospatial frameworks, and data pipelines, it took a glorious detour into pure 1980s joy.

Morris shared the story of turning an ’87 Pontiac Firebird into his own version of KITT from Knight Rider during the early days of Allvision. What began as a joking reward for closing a funding round became a real build, complete with help from Butler County-based Knight Rider enthusiasts, a rush to prep the car for a History Channel appearance, and one unforgettable twist: the electronic voice box he sourced from Italy meant his version of KITT spoke with an Italian accent. In a conversation full of big ideas about the future, it was the perfect ending: a reminder that even serious innovators are still, at heart, kids thrilled to make the machine talk back.