Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, May 27th.

Today on Forbes, Pokemon Go made Niantic billions.

Now it's ditching gaming for AI.

Walking through Niantic's headquarters in San Francisco's historic ferry building,

visitors are greeted by a scrum of giant Pokemon stuffed animals.

On amphitheater-style steps, an enormous snorlax, naps in the corner, while a bulbosaur sits

ready to pounce. Elsewhere, a stunned side duck stares vacantly toward the distance, and perhaps

the company's unexpected future.

In March, Niantic made a bombshell announcement.

The developer of Pokemon Go, once the biggest mobile game ever in the U.S., is abandoning games to go all in on AI.

It is sold off its game development business to Saudi-owned game maker scoply in a $3.5 billion deal

and rebranded itself as Niantic Spatial.

Instead of building augmented reality games for mobile phones, it will develop artificial

intelligence models that analyze the real world for enterprise clients.

Co-founder and CEO John Hanke told Forbes, quote,

it's kind of unusual for a successful company to do this cellular division,

form two companies.

It became clear to us that the way to maximize the opportunity for both

was to let each of them go and pursue its future.

Now, Niantic is doubling down on its nascent spatial platform, announced in November,

which provides AI mapping tools that companies can use to chart out routes for robots

or power-augmented reality glasses.

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