What teachers should know about AI in ArcGIS StoryMaps (2025)

[TomBaker]

In most schools, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hotly debated and frequently regulated by school district policy.  With the addition of AI Assistants to the ArcGIS platform, there’s no better time to know how to enable or disable AI Assistants and understand the capacities of the tools.

As of this writing, AI Assistants must be enabled by an ArcGIS Online Organization administrator.  When enabled, all AI Assistants are available to all users in the organization. To check your organization, login with an admin account and click Organization >> Settings >> AI Assistant.  By default, AI Assistants are turned off.  Also note that while this blog focuses on the four AI Assistants in StoryMaps, there are several AI Assistants now available across multiple Esri tools.

During July of 2025, Esri announced the addition of four new AI Assistants for ArcGIS StoryMaps.  AI Assistants use large language models to create or alter text. They are generative AI. These four StoryMap AI Assistants are:

1. Insights assistant — located in the About this story section of the Insights panel, this provides some metrics and indicators that can be used to help define, describe, and quantify your story.
2. Accessibility assistant — found in the Accessibility tab of the options for images that are added to a story. It uses AI to generate suggested alt text for the image.
3. Writing assistant — part of the text formatting toolbar when a chunk of text is highlighted. It uses AI to make the designated text clearer, more concise, grammatically correct, and/or fit one of four general “tones”.
4. Theme assistant — appears as one of the initial starting point options when creating a new theme. It responds to a written prompt by generating a theme with some color and font selections already made (text from W. Hackney).

>>> Read more about these tools in William Hackney’s post.

For classroom teachers, there are a handful of key take-aways to understand.

1. The new Insights AI Assistant and panel will calculate the Flesh-Kincaid grade readability score of a storymap you have created.  It will also estimate reading time for a typical adult. Each of these metrics can be invaluable for teachers creating storymaps.
2. The Writing AI Assistant can improve but also generate written text, if prompted properly. If a student writes:

• “The bear gracefully walked through the creek”, the AI Assistant can rewrite, correct grammar, or change the tone of the sentence.
• “Write a paragraph about a bear walking through a stream”, the AI Assistant will generate the requested new paragraph when asked to “Rephrase” the text.

1. All AI Assistants are either available to all users in the organization or turned off for everyone.  This means there is currently no option to allow teachers access but disallow student access.

To learn about workflows, security, AI bias and more, see the Esri documentation.

The AI Assistants in StoryMaps are a powerful addition to the story-telling tools. Be sure you understand the capacities and nuances of these AI tools moving forward.