Geospatial teams often move quickly for good reasons. A city needs a public-facing dashboard. A state agency needs an operational map for emergency response. A transportation team needs to visualize assets, permits, projects, or real-time conditions. Platforms like ArcGIS Experience Builder help organizations stand up solutions quickly and provide a strong starting point for many use cases. But sometimes successful projects create a new challenge: Growth.
As applications mature, teams frequently discover that the original implementation begins to show limits in areas such as accessibility requirements, customization, maintainability, or advanced workflow needs. What started as a dashboard becomes something larger: a business application. This is where the conversation often shifts from configuration to engineering.
The Point Where “No-Code” Meets Reality
Many organizations eventually encounter scenarios such as:
- Accessibility requirements that need to meet city, state, or federal WCAG standards
- Complex workflows that exceed what configurable widgets can easily support
- Responsive design issues across devices
- Performance bottlenecks with increasingly sophisticated dashboards
- Requirements for deeper integration with external systems
- Custom user experiences beyond available templates
- Long-term maintainability concerns
Accessibility often becomes one of the largest drivers.
Public agencies increasingly need applications that align with WCAG standards and support keyboard navigation, screen readers, focus management, semantic structure, and inclusive design practices. The challenge is rarely the data itself. The challenge is preserving the value already created while evolving the application into something more capable.
Avoid Throwing Away the Work
Historically, reaching these limits could mean starting over. Teams would rebuild an application manually from scratch:
- Study the existing Experience Builder implementation
- Reverse engineer workflows
- Identify map services and dependencies
- Rebuild UI components
- Recreate business logic
- Repeat months of work
That process is expensive and often discourages modernization. Today there is a different path emerging.
Using LLM Agents as Accelerators, Not Replacements
One of the more promising approaches we have observed combines human expertise with AI-assisted migration workflows. With proper guardrails in place, LLM agents can help accelerate the process by:
- Exploring Experience Builder implementations using browser automation tools such as Playwright
- Identifying widgets, layouts, and user interactions
- Mapping connected web map services and dependencies
- Documenting patterns and workflows
- Assisting developers in reconstructing equivalent application experiences
The key distinction is that AI is not replacing engineering teams. AI becomes an accelerator that helps teams preserve the value of existing investments. Developers still make architectural decisions, validate accessibility, refine business logic, and build durable solutions.
The Result: A Modern Application Foundation
The target architecture often becomes a custom React-based application using technologies such as:
- React and TypeScript
- Material UI for accessible interface components
- Responsive design patterns
- ArcGIS Maps SDK integration
- Existing web maps and services already powering the original solution
This creates a path where organizations can:
- Retain investments in maps and services
- Improve accessibility compliance
- Deliver better user experiences
- Enable custom workflows
- Support future enhancements
- Reduce redevelopment time
Instead of abandoning previous work, teams gain a foundation that can continue evolving.
Example
The result of around 10 tests of converting Experience Builder to React in less than a day. Below includes an example with map, filters, dashboards, charts, pop-ups.
Human Expertise Still Matters
AI can help accelerate discovery and migration activities, but successful projects still depend on experienced teams that understand:
- GIS architecture
- Accessibility standards
- Application design
- Cloud infrastructure
- User workflows
- Long-term operational needs
The most effective approach combines human oversight with AI-enabled acceleration. That combination can turn a months-long rebuild effort into a structured modernization process.
Looking Forward
Experience Builder remains a valuable tool and fits many scenarios extremely well. Applications sometimes grow beyond the boundaries of configuration-first platforms. When that happens, organizations should not feel trapped between accepting limitations or starting over entirely. There is now a middle path: preserving existing investments while transitioning toward modern, accessible applications designed for long-term growth.
If your organization is reaching the limits of Experience Builder or needs to address accessibility, scalability, or custom workflow challenges, Xentity can help evaluate modernization strategies and build a roadmap that moves beyond platform constraints while retaining the value already created. The goal is not to replace what works. The goal is to help good solutions grow into great ones.