The application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in geography is promising and widely involved in the observation, analysis, simulation and prediction of geographic processes. We take “intelligent sensing-smart expression” as a channel to sort out the manifestation of AI in geography and the current application status in various fields of geography. On this basis, the challenges of current applications in terms of intelligent processing of geographic big data, scale effects, and uncertainty of models are summarized, and future development in terms of coordination and collaboration of multi-source data, integration of models, interpretability of AI, and construction of geographic big models are proposed. It is emphasized that for AI geography applications will gradually learn a large amount of geographic element data through collaborative mining of geographic big data, enhance the integration and interpretation of models, and train big models with the ability to understand the three laws of geography.