Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) has gone live with a digital twin of six hospitals as part of its strategy to create a smart estate. Designed to provide a single source of estates data to support new workflows and better decision making, the 3D model is a major milestone in MFT’s digital transformation to improve operational efficiency and patient safety.

Replacing disparate systems and paper-based processes, the digital twin visualises floors, rooms and spaces with associated data and is already being used to understand space optimisation and support the management of RAAC and asbestos. Future plans include adding indoor navigation, patient contact tracing and real-time asset tracking.

Created using Esri UK’s GIS platform, which includes indoor mapping, spatial analysis, navigation and asset tracking, the digital twin went live in October 2025. BIS Consult, MFT’s strategic data partner, led the development of the underlying data strategy and the integration of the multiple information sources required.

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Spanning 274,000 square metres of internal floor space, the 3D model includes Manchester Royal Infirmary, Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, Manchester Royal Eye Hospital and Saint Mary’s Hospital on the Oxford Road campus, plus Altrincham Hospital and Withington Community Hospital.

David Bailey, Head of Digital Estates at MFT, who led the project, said: “Integrating all of our existing data into one 3D model has created the foundation for building a digital twin and is driving new opportunities for efficiency gains. Moving from analogue to digital achieves a better understanding of our buildings and assets which helps improve their management and maintenance, as well as improving patient safety.”

The digital twin is being used in a trial to better understand the use of space, by quickly showing where room usage is not being optimised. Full roll-out will provide all staff with a real-time view of occupancy levels and space requests, while clinicians will be able to examine existing facilities more easily and plan new services.

New applications for RAAC and asbestos management involve performing digital surveys on mobile devices, which feed directly into the 3D model and visualise the different risk levels.

The next phase will map the remaining four hospitals in MFT’s estate and digitise building condition surveys to help tackle the maintenance backlog. This will involve mobile data capture feeding into the digital twin, providing a clearer picture of requirements and helping to prioritise resources. Replacing a manual spreadsheet approach, data and reports will be shared more easily among project teams. Energy usage data will also be added to the digital twin to help analyse and reduce energy costs.

The project overcame a major data integration challenge, which involved combining MFT data from multiple systems, including CAFM (Computer-Aided Facility Management) and CAD floor plans and improving the overall data quality. Establishing new data governance so information connected to the 3D model was accurate and up to date was also achieved.

Duncan Booth, Head of Health & Social Care, Esri UK, said: “Indoor mapping is playing a central role in the modernisation of MFT’s estates and facilities department by giving users situational awareness of the entire site. Optimising the use of existing buildings and making RAAC and asbestos management more efficient are the first of many new benefits. Already used at airports, universities and industrial sites, the technology is helping large organisations realise plans for digital twins and is now experiencing growth in healthcare.”

Plans for the future include using Esri’s GIS platform to create applications for indoor navigation for patients and staff to reduce missed appointments, contact tracing of patients to help stop the spread of pathogens inside the hospital and digital asset tracking, enabling equipment such as beds, scanners or wheelchairs to be located more quickly.

Nicholas Campbell-Voegt, Ddrector at BIS Consult, commented: “This project shows how smart use of data can transform NHS estates. By creating a single source of truth for assets and space, MFT is paving the way for a new standard in how Trusts manage their estates. The approach provides a blueprint that other NHS organisations can follow, helping build smarter, safer and more sustainable healthcare environments.”

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Technology from Esri, Nvidia, and Microsoft is being used in a pilot project for the City of Raleigh to better understand traffic flows and impacts. The “Raleigh In Motion” digital twin project uses AI to analyse massive volumes of data captured by real-time cameras.

The traffic monitoring software allows city officials to monitor current and historic traffic flows through key intersections at the city. Nvidia AI technology processes real-time video from hundreds of cameras around the city to identify vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians.

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These feeds are then mapped in Esri ArcGIS where city officials can analyse which intersections are congested based on time of day and day of week.

Indicators on the map turn from green to yellow to red as congestion builds up in intersections. The dashboard can even flag current events like stalled vehicles in an intersection that are impacting traffic.

By fusing real-time streaming data via ArcGIS GeoEvent Server with computer vision capabilities from Nvidia, this digital twin can help Raleigh identify dangerous intersections, reduce congestion and provide safer roadways for vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians.

With these insights, the city can better respond to current incidents and intelligently plan how to remediate problematic, and even dangerous, intersections, helping the city maintain safer streets.

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Bentley Systems has released new resources to help developers use its iTwin Platform APIs within Cesium, the 3D geospatial visualisation technology that Bentley acquired in September 2024. The move is intended to streamline integration between infrastructure digital twins and large-scale geospatial applications.

The iTwin Platform provides a set of open-core APIs for creating and managing digital twins—data-rich virtual models used across the lifecycle of infrastructure assets. Cesium, now operating as part of Bentley, is known for its 3D globe and mapping technology and for originating the 3D Tiles open standard, widely adopted for streaming large-scale 3D datasets.

The latest release provides tutorials and example workflows that demonstrate how iTwin APIs can be used inside CesiumJS applications. Developers can, for instance, combine geospatial context streamed from Cesium ion with engineering design data managed in iTwin, and visualise both in a single environment.

Key functions highlighted in the release include:

• Data integration: Support for engineering formats from applications such as MicroStation, Revit, AutoCAD, Navisworks, and Rhino. Data is automatically converted into optimised 3D Tiles for visualisation.
• Design history: APIs allow applications to display versioned design states, enabling comparisons of alternate options.
• Metadata access: ECSQL support makes it possible to query and filter models based on attributes.
• Project workflows: Developers can incorporate tasks such as clash detection, change management, and issue tracking directly within Cesium-based applications.

Three tutorials currently available focus on adding real-world geospatial context, visualising iTwin design data in CesiumJS, and switching between design options. Bentley has said further tutorials will expand to metadata querying, navigating to individual model elements, combining multiple iTwins in a single scene, and exposing advanced iTwin APIs.

The integration reflects Bentley’s strategy following the Cesium acquisition: to bring together detailed engineering models with scalable geospatial visualisation under a single umbrella, while continuing to support open standards. For infrastructure owners, operators, and developers, the alignment is designed to reduce duplication of effort when linking project data to broader geographic settings.

The iTwin–Cesium connection is particularly relevant for organisations that need to situate detailed infrastructure data within a regional or national context, such as utilities, transportation agencies, and government bodies. It also supports use cases that involve public communication, planning, and monitoring, where both engineering detail and geographic scale are required.

By publishing these APIs and supporting resources, Bentley is signalling its intention to make its digital twin technology more accessible to developers working with open geospatial ecosystems. With Cesium now part of Bentley, the release formalises an integration that has been evolving since the company first backed the 3D Tiles standard in 2018.

Documentation and tutorials are available through Bentley’s iTwin developer portal and Cesium’s channels.

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The Nemetschek Group has partnered with Iowa State University on a housing project designed to address the shortage of affordable housing in the US state.

The Iowa Innovative Housing Project is utilising 3D construction printing and other innovative approaches to lower construction risks, reduce material usage and waste, and ultimately deliver cost-effective, resilient, and sustainable housing options.

In the current pilot phase, the university is utilising Nemetschek’s dTwin solution to create a ‘dynamic and interactive’ build environment using digital twins of each planned structure, with dashboard visualisations for monitoring and data analysis.

The project’s use of dTwin will progress with the construction of a 3D-printed shed incorporating live sensors that will provide real-time data about air quality and energy consumption.

“Nemetschek’s dTwin solution has changed how we approach every new home in this project, says Pete Evans, assistant professor of industrial design at Iowa State. “We’re able to visualise every aspect of a planned structure in one seamless view.

“We can monitor air quality and energy consumption and compare this with buildings constructed traditionally, giving us incredibly valuable insights. We hope to use the dTwin platform extensively across every stage — design, construction, and property management — as we work to solve rural housing issues in an affordable and sustainable way.”

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Project Tandem, as it used be known, was initiated in February 2020, previewed at Autodesk University 2020, and released for public beta in 2021. Four years on, there are still significant layers of technology being added to the product, now focussing on higher levels of functionality beyond dashboards and connecting to IoT sensors, adding systems knowledge, support for timeline events and upgrades to fundamentals such as visualisation quality.

Tandem development seems to have followed a unique path, maintaining its incubator-like status, with Autodesk placing a significant bet on the future size of an embryonic market.

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For those following the development of Tandem the one thing that comes across crystal clear, is that creating a digital twin of even a single building — model generation, tagging and sorting assets, assigning subsystems, connecting to IoT, and building dashboards — is a huge task that requires ongoing maintenance of that data.

It’s not really ‘just an output of BIM’ which many might feel is a natural follow on. It has the capability to go way beyond the scope of what is normally called Facilities Management (FM), which has mainly been carried out with 2D drawings.

The quantitative benefit of building a digital twin requires dedication, investment and an adoption of twins as a core business strategy. For large facilities, like airports, universities, hospitals – anything with significant operating expenses – this should be a ‘no brainer’ but as with any investment the owner/operator has to pay upfront to build the twin, to realise the benefits in the long tail, measured in years and decades. This, to me, makes the digital twins market not a volume product play.

Tandem evolution

My first observation is that the visual quality of Tandem has really gone up a notch, or three. Tandem is partially developed using Autodesk’s Forge components (now called Autodesk Platform Services). The model viewer front end came from the Forge viewer, which to be honest was blocky and a bit crappy-looking, in a 1990s computer graphics kind of way. The updated display brings up the rendering quality and everything looks sharper. The models look great and the colour feedback when displaying in-model data is fantastic. It’s amazing that this makes such a difference, but it brings the graphics in to the 21st century. Tandem looks good.

As Tandem has added more layers of functionality the interface tool palettes have grown. The interface is still being refined, and Autodesk is now adopting the approach of offering different UIs to cater to different user personas, such as operators who might be more familiar with 2D floor plans than 3D.

Other features that have been added include the ability to use labels or floor plans to isolate them in the display, auto views to simplify navigation, asset property cards (which can appear in view, as opposed to bringing up the large party panel) and thresholds, which can be set to fire off alerts when unexpected behaviour is identified. Users can now create groups of assets and allocate them to concepts such as ‘by room’. Spaces can now also be drawn directly in Tandem.

Speed is also improved. As Tandem is database centric, not file based, it enables dynamic loading of geometry and data, leading to fast performance even with complex models. It also facilitates the ability to retain all historical data and easily integrate new data sources as the product grows. This is the way all design-related software will run. Tandem benefits from being conceived in this modern cloud era.

That said, development of Tandem has moved beyond simply collecting, filtering, tagging and visualising data to providing actionable insights and recommendations. From talking with Bob Bray, vice president and general manager of Autodesk Tandem and Tim Kelly, head of Tandem product strategy, the next big step for Tandem is to analyse the rich data collected to identify issues and suggest optimisations. These proactive insights would include potential cost savings and carbon footprint reduction through intelligent HVAC management based on actual occupancy data.

Systems tracing

Having dumb geometry in dumb spaces was pretty much the full extent of traditional CAFM. Digital twins can and should be way smarter. The systems tracing capability in Tandem simplifies the understanding of all the complex building systems and their spatial relationships, aiding operations, maintenance, and troubleshooting. By clicking on building system elements, you can see the connections between different elements within a building’s systems and see how networks of branches and zones relate to the physical spaces they serve and identify where critical components are located within the space. This means if something goes wrong, should that be discovered via IoT or reported by an occupant, systems tracing allows the issue to be pinpointed down to a specific level and room. Users can select a component like an air supply and then trace its connection down though subsystems to the spaces it serves.

Tandem is a cloud-based conduit, pooling information from multiple sources which is then refined by each user to give them insight into layers of spatial and telemetric data

Building in this connection between components to make a ‘system’, used to be a pretty manual process. Now, Tandem can automatically map the relationships between spaces and systems and use them for analysis to identify the root cause of problems. Timelines Data is valuable and BMS (Building Management Systems) and IoT sensors generate the building equivalent of an ‘ECG’ every couple of seconds. The historical, as well as the live data is incredibly valuable. Timelines in Tandem display this historic sensor data in a visual context. Kelly demonstrated an animated heatmap overlaid on the building model showing how temperature values fluctuate across a facility. It’s now possible to navigate back and forth through a defined period, either stepping through specific points or via animation, seeing changes to assets and spaces.

While the current implementation focuses on visualising historic data, Kelly mentioned the future possibility of the timeline being used to load or hide geometry based on changes over time, reflecting renovations or other physical alterations to the building.

Bray added that Tandem never deletes anything, implying that the historical data required for the timeline functionality is automatically retained within the system. This allows users to access and analyse past performance and conditions within the building at any point in the future, should that become a need.

Asset monitoring

Asset monitoring dashboards in Tandem are designed to provide users with a centralised view for monitoring the performance and status of their key assets. This feature, which is now in beta, aims to help operators identify issues and prioritise their actions. They will be customisable, and users can create dashboards to monitor the specific assets they care about This allows for a tailored overview of the most critical equipment and systems within their facility.

The dashboards will likely allow users to establish KPIs and tolerance thresholds for their assets. By setting these parameters, the system can accurately measure asset performance and identify when an asset is operating outside of expected or acceptable ranges with visual feedback of assets out of optimal performance.

Assets that are consistently operating out of tolerance or experiencing recurring issues can be grouped to aid focus e.g. by level, room, manufacturer. With this in mind, Tandem also has a ‘trend analysis’ capability, allowing users to identify potential future problems based on current performance patterns. The goal of these asset monitoring dashboards is to help drive preventative maintenance and planning for equipment replacement.

Tandem Connect

Digital Twin creation and connectivity to live information means there is a big integration story to tell and it’s different on nearly every implementation. Tandem is a cloud-based conduit, pooling information from multiple sources which is then refined by each user to give them insight into layers of spatial and telemetric data. To do that, Autodesk needed to have integration tools to tap into, or export out to, the established systems, should that be CAFM, IoT, BMS, BIM, CAD, databases etc.

Tandem Connect is designed to simplify that process and comes with prepacked integration solutions for a broad range of commonly used BMS. IoT and asset management tools. This is not to be confused with other developments such as Tandem APIs or SDKs.

The application was acquired and so has a different style of UI to other Autodesk products. Using a graphical front end, integrations can be initially plug and play, such as connecting to Microsoft Azure, through a graph interface. The core idea behind this is to ‘democratise the development of visual twins’ and not require a software engineer to get involved. However more esoteric connections may require some element of coding. Bray admitted there was significant ‘opportunity for consultancy’ that arises from the whole connectivity piece of the pie and that a few large system integrators were already talking with Autodesk about that opportunity.

Bray explained that Tandem Connect enables not only data inflow and outflow but also ‘workflow automation and data manipulation’. He gave an example where HVAC settings could be read into Tandem Connect, and a comfort index could be written, which was demonstrated at Autodesk University 2024.

Product roadmap

Autodesk keeps a product roadmap which has been pretty accurate to show the development of travel, given the regular video updates.

Two of the more interesting capabilities in development are portfolio optimisation and the development of more SDK options, plus the possibility of future integration of applications. Portfolio optimisation will allow users to view data of multiple facilities in one central location and should provide analytics to predict future events with suggested actions for streamlining operations.

Beyond the current Rest API (Now), Autodesk is developing a full JavaScript Tandem SDK to build custom applications that leverage Tandem’s logic and visual interactivity. In the long-term, Autodesk says it will possibly enable extensions for developers to include functionality within the Tandem application itself.

Conclusion

Tandem development continues relentlessly. The capabilities that are being added now are starting to get into the high value category. While refinements are always being added to the creation and filtering, once the data is in and tagged and intelligently put into systems, it’s then about deep integration, alerts for out of nominal operation at a granular level, historical analysis of systems, spaces and rooms, all with easy visual feedback and the potential for yet more data analysis and intelligence.

Bray uses a digital twin maturity model to outline the key stages of development needed to realise the full potential of digital twin technology. It starts with building a Descriptive Twin (as-built replica), then Informative Twin (granular operational data), then Predictive Twin (enabling predictive analytics), Comprehensive Twin (what-if simulation) and Autonomous Twin (self-tuning facilities).

At the moment, Tandem is crossing from Informative to Predictive, but the stated intent for higher level functionality is there. However the warning is, your digital twin is only ever as good as the quality of the data you have input.

Some of the early users of Tandem are now being highlighted by the company. In a recent webinar, Brendan Dillon, director of digital facilities & infrastructure, Denver International Airport gave a deep dive into how they integrated Maximo with Tandem to monitor facility operations.

Tandem is an Autodesk outlier. It’s not a volume product and it’s not something that Autodesk’s channel can easily sell. It’s an investment in a product development that is quite unusual at the company. It doesn’t necessarily map to the way Autodesk currently operates as, from my perspective, it’s really a consultancy sale, to a relatively small number of asset owners – unlike Bentley Systems, whose digital twin offerings often operate at national scale across sectors like road and rail. The good news is that Autodesk has a lot of customers, and they will be self-selecting potential Tandem customers, knowing they need to implement a digital twin strategy and probably have a good understanding of the arduous journey that may be. The Tandem team is trying to make that as easy as possible and clearly developing it out in the open brings a level of interaction with customers that in these days is to be commended.

Meanwhile, with its acquisition of niche products like Innovyze for hydraulic modelling, there are some indications that Autodesk is perhaps looking to cater to more involved engagements with big facility owners, and I see Tandem as falling into that category at the moment, while the broader twins market has still yet to be clearly identified.

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It’s tough being one of the first to enter a market but for Space, one of the country’s most BIM-centric architectural practices, it was a case of needs must. In 2016, its BIM consultancy spin-off, BIM Technologies, identified a need for its clients to be able to access their model data without the need for expensive software or hardware. Development started and this eventually became Twinview, launched in 2019.

Space Group is a practicing architecture firm, a BIM software developer, a services supplier, a BIM components / objects library creator and distributor. So, not only does it develop BIM software, it also uses the software in its own practice, as well as sell its solutions and services to other firms.

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Selling twins

In previous conversations with CEO Rob Charlton on the market’s appetite for digital twins, he has been frank in the difficulty in getting buy in from fellow architects, developers and even owner operators. The customers who got into twins early were firms that owned portfolios of buildings which were sold as eco-grade investments.

Charlton acknowledges that he always expected it to be a long-term endeavour, “We started this development knowing it was it was a five year plus journey to any level of maturity or even awareness”. He draws a parallel to the adoption of BIM, recalling that even though Space bought its first license of Revit around 2001, it didn’t gain significant traction until around 2011, and even then, this was largely due to UK BIM mandates.

The early digital twin market development was a ‘slow burn’. Charlton contrasts BIM Technologies’ patient, self-funded approach with companies that seek large VC funding, arguing that “ the market will move at the level it’s ready for”.

He explains that the good news is that over the last year, there has been an increase in awareness of the value
of digital twins, particularly in the last six months.

This awareness is seen in the fact that clients are now putting out Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for digital twin solutions. For Charlton, this is a fundamental difference compared to the past, where they would have to approach firms to explain the benefits of digital twins. Now, the clients themselves have made the decision that they want a digital twin and are seeking proposals from providers.

Priorities and needs

There’s a lot of talk about digital twins but very little talk concerning the actual benefits of investing in building them. Charlton explains a lot of twin clients are increasingly interested in reducing carbon in buildings, whether that be in embodied or operational and compliance and safety. “It’s an area that Space is particularly passionate about but there is an inconsistency in how embodied carbon reviews and measurements are conducted,” he says.
Customer access to operational data is also important, explains Charlton, “Clients want to gain insights into how their buildings are actually performing in real time.”

He also notes that the facilities and the integration with facilities management is equally important, to streamline maintenance, manage issues, and improve overall building operations.

Clients value the ability to have “access to their information in one place” adds Charlton. And here, the cloud is the perfect solution to deliver a unified platform which consolidates models, and documents related to building assets.

Twinview clients are especially interested in owning their own data. Charlton gives the example of a New Zealand archive project, explaining that the client was particularly interested in having Twinview to maintain independence when using a subcontractor or external service provider, which might come and go over the project lifetime.

Back in the UK, Twinview is being used in conjunction with ‘desk sensors’ on an NHS project to optimise space and potentially avoid unnecessary capital expenditure. Charlton explains that the client was finding the digital twin useful for “analysis on how the space is used” because they were seeking to validate or challenge space needs assessments by consultants.

Increasingly, contractual obligations include performance data. For one of Space’s school clients, the DFA Woodman Academy, there’s a contractual obligation to provide energy performance data at month, three months and 12-months. Digital twin technology facilitated the compliance goal within the performance-based contract. The IoT sensors also identified high levels of CO2 in the classrooms, prompting an investigation into the cause.
Twinview goes beyond the traditional digital twin model for operations and has been used to connect residents to live building information. On a residential project, tenants access the Twinview data on their mobile phones to see energy levels in the buildings, temperatures and CO2, all through their own app.

Artificial Intelligence

Everyone is talking about AI, and Twinview now features a ChatGPT-like front end. This enables plain language search within the digital twin, both at an asset level and with regards to performance data. Charlton explains that while the AI in Twinview has a ‘ChatGPT-like interface’, it is not directly ChatGPT, although it does connect to it. He explains that Twinview developed its own system. This is possibly due to the commercial costs associated with using ChatGPT for continuous queries. The AI in Twinview accesses all building information, including the model, operational data, and tickets, which are stored in a single bucket on AWS. Looking to the future, Charlton mentions that the next stage of AI development for Twinview will be focused on prediction and learning. This includes the ability to generate reports automatically (e.g. weekly on average CO2 levels), predict future energy usage, and suggest ways to improve building performance. A key differentiator for AI in Twinview in the future, will be in its capacity to understand correlations between disparate datasets that are often siloed, such as occupancy data, fire analysis, and energy consumption. By applying a GPT-like technology over this connected data, the aim is to uncover new insights and solutions.

Development Journey

From a slow burn start, despite being a relatively small UK business and competing with big software firms with
deep pockets, Charlton told us that Twinview had already won international clients and is currently being
shortlisted for other significant international projects, including one on the west coast of America, against international competition.

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Cintoo is adding new portfolio options to its Cintoo platform – the BIM and Twin Editions.

The Cintoo platform, which is focused on reality data, allows users to upload and stream huge 3D data files from any desktop or laptop via a web browser. Users can compare reality data to their BIM and CAD models or scans to scans for project collaboration and optimisation.

The new BIM Edition is designed for AEC-centric workflows and includes features such as progress monitoring and issue tracking for performing analysis and to help eliminate risk.

The Twin Edition of the Cintoo platform is aimed at huge industrial and manufacturing sites to help improve asset visibility, digital twin management, and optimise facility maintenance and rework.

Cintoo has also introduced a new look and feel to the Cintoo platform. According to the company, it’s now easier to access key tools and the updated head ribbon maximises project space, as panels have been moved to the menu on the right-hand side.

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It’s rare that a piece of industry news arrives in my inbox and prompts me to do a double-take. But that’s exactly what happened on 6 September, with the news that Bentley Systems had acquired Cesium.

Bentley Systems is the infrastructure giant in the AECO space and is currently undergoing a changing of the guard as the brothers who founded the company take a step back and get a new executive team installed.

That can be a distracting process for any organisation. However, new Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins has made the choice to forge ahead with an industry significant acquisition, probably the most impactful since Google sold SketchUp to Trimble.

Because Bentley has always strongly focused on infrastructure, geospatial has played an important part in the data frameworks that its solutions provide. Decades ago, the company was the first CAD software firm to integrate a world-based coordinate system in its file format, because big infrastructure projects are always located somewhere and can span thousands of kilometres.

Bentley has had agreements with Esri, in addition to offering its own mapping and cadastre-driven tools. However, for the last few years, it has obsessively developed and also acquired technologies relating to 4D construction, reality capture, digital twin and asset management.

Bentley Systems is not the only AEC-focused software firm to understand the importance of geospatial. When Andrew Anagnost took the CEO job at Autodesk in 2017, he didn’t waste time in forging a partnership with ESRI and starting to back-fill the company’s BIM and civils products with GIS integration. Autodesk also actively chased Bentley Systems’ Department of Transport clients and acquired Innovyze in 2021 to expand into water treatment, another Bentley dominated market. For over five years, Esri and Autodesk have been developing hooks between their products, enabling the movement of BIM and GIS within their ecosystems.

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Enter Cesium

So where does Cesium fit into all this? For many reasons, the company hasn’t previously seemed like an acquisition option. In much the same vein as Robert McNeel and Rhino, Cesium built a business based on community and established a huge network of around one million users, as well as about 10,000 developers, with powerful yet relatively low-cost GIS integration/distribution tools.

Cesium has a deep belief in the open source approach to software, putting a lot of effort into the development of Cesium. JS and its streamable, interactive 3D Tile open format, which supports vector, 4D, 2D, 3D, point clouds and photogrammetry. This is free for both commercial and non-commercial use and has been used to map subsurface, surface, airborne and space environments.

Cesium’s formats have been embraced by the likes of Google and NASA. Its data structures, meanwhile, also support other open formats, such as glTF for model info (asset information), as well as the latest advances in GPU acceleration. While the technology is a perfect fit for Bentley’s digital twin strategy, the culture fit was, on the face of it, incongruous to corporate customers.

Around the time of the 2020 Open Letter to Autodesk, I had a conversation with Keith Bentley, then Bentley Systems CTO, in which we discussed whether open source applications such as Blender BIM were the way to go. From that chat, I was left in little doubt that this was not Keith Bentley’s mindset, since he was strongly of the belief that programmers’ efforts should be rewarded.

However, he was more inclined to agree that open source data was perhaps a way forward, because for customers, the keys to data must remain in their hands. The whole premise of digital twins requires the assembling of data from all sorts of applications, in many file formats. In that respect, data trapped in proprietary silos is likely to be an industry-wide problem. In 2021, Bentley opened the iTwin.js library with source code hosted on GitHub and distributed under the MIT licence. Since then, Bentley has been seeking wider adoption of its iTwin data wrapper.

So, while I was pondering Cesium’s culture fit, I hadn’t considered Bentley’s cultural change. Its newfound belief in open data isn’t just a passing fad. It really is something that the company intends to deliver on.

When considered from that angle, acquiring Cesium takes Bentley closer to its goal of having open format technology that covers all the many different sources of data necessary to build an infrastructure digital twin. That could be scan / photogrammetry data, BIM data, GIS data, asset tagging and management data.

Of course, Cesium offers far more besides. Its super-fast 3D pipeline enables huge datasets to be visualised locally in Unreal Engine, on the web, on a mobile and in real time. The Cesium ecosystem also includes developers who may want to utilise Bentley’s wide array of SaaS analytical and simulation tools or BIM capabilities, and existing customers will be able to view their digital twins in geospatial context for analysis and service planning.

In conversation

In conversation with Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi, he outlined for me his view of the deal. “Cesium is an open-source project doing massive scale 3D geospatial, open source, open standards, large models with semantics on the web. When Bentley found Cesium eight or nine years ago, they opened up our eyes. They said, ‘Hey, Patrick, this is more than geospatial. This can do the built environment. This can do infrastructure,” he said.

He continued: “When we brought 3D Tiles to OGC (The Open Geospatial Consortium) to make an OGC community standard, Bentley was part of that original submission team. This is going back to 2017. Bentley had ContextCapture, now called iTwin Capture, which was some of the first photogrammetry ever put into Cesium. We have had a long relationship with Bentley. We’ve known the Bentley brothers, the leadership team of today, and we think we share a lot of the same DNA. We like Bentley’s interest and commitment and authenticity around open source, open standards, and building a platform which uplifts the ecosystem. We know that that is Bentley’s belief and it’s where Bentley wants to take the future.”

We are transitioning from files to a data centric world, and customers need to have confidence and trust in how the data is going to be handled. We believe in a true open approach, which is based on open standards, open source and open APIs Julien Moutte, Bentley Systems CTO

A few days prior to announcing the acquisition, Cesium published a press release regarding its BIM integration technology preview. At that time, AEC Magazine reached out to the company, but they couldn’t answer, because they were busy finalising the deal. Cozzi added, “As you saw just before the agreement, we are doing more in AEC.’” I suspect that Bentley has a raft of technology to assist in that.

Bentley CTO Julien Moutte then gave me the Bentley perspective, “We are transitioning from files to a data centric world, and customers need to have confidence and trust in how the data is going to be handled. We believe in a true open approach, which is based on open standards, open source and open APIs,” he said.

“The iTwin technology stack is going to continue using more and more open standards. We are looking at creating and enriching the standard ecosystem with some new capabilities around BIM collaboration. We have discussed the limitations we’ve seen in IFC, for instance, and we’ve created BI-model technology, and I think one thing we captured in the room at NXT BLD is that not many know about (Bentley) iModels,” he continued.

“We need to learn how to be better in creating an ecosystem, a community. And I think that’s one of the things that Patrick and his team are going to bring to us. We want to create a thriving developer ecosystem on top of this platform, which is built around open data.”

Cesium has about 60 employees based in Philadelphia. They are mainly programmers, with about 10 people in sales – but sales are mainly inbound and focused on products such as its Cesium Ion SaaS 3D geospatial data hubs, together with large partnerships and hosting. The Cesium offices are located not too far from the Bentley Exton Headquarters. By joining forces with Bentley, Cozzi said that it will allow the company to achieve more industry impact.

Moutte also explained what he thinks Cesium brings to Bentley tech stack. “There are multiple facets here. Obviously, I believe that our users, the engineers of the world, would benefit greatly in having more context when they do their work, and we believe that the best way to provide this to them is by leveraging the Cesium technology.

“Today, we’re trying to do this with the iTwin platform, but I think there is a better way to do this when it comes to geospatial data, bringing in Google 3D Tiles, making sure that we can combine and bring all of that data in an environment in an aligned way, using the geospatial coordinates. Whether it’s underground, buildings or engineering models, it’s about more value to our users,” he said.

He concluded: “The huge Cesium ecosystem is consuming Cesium geospatial data. If they are bringing building models in, they don’t have the full detail of what those building models contain. It’s mostly geometry. There’s a lot of value we could deliver by providing access to the metadata of those building models. We have capabilities to bring in geospatial analysis, lots of simulation, whether it’s flooding, mobility, structures and visualising all of this in the context of geospatial is also very valuable. It’s a massive opportunity.”

Cozzi added, “BIM could learn a lot from these large GIS models. 3D Tiles doesn’t just stream the geometry and metadata for terrain and photogrammetry, but can also do that for the built environment. Up to this point, a lot of that has been done in OBJ files or FBX, which are standard graphics files. We thought we could help them more, so have built some new pipelines to preserve more of that semantic data, especially the hierarchical nature.”

So, for example, Cesium built a pipeline for IFC, and also into Revit, he explains. “Then we run our super-smart algorithms on the geometry and metadata, and frankly, the metadata might actually be heavier than the geometry. Then, in a domain-specific way, we slice and dice that into 3D Tiles, so that it’s streamed very effectively over the web, placed within a geospatial context,” he said.

“So where do we go next? Bentley brings a ton of domain knowledge about infrastructure and AEC, and we keep saying ‘better together’.”

Conclusion

Cozzi will now head up the iTwin platform developed within Bentley. While the technology benefit has been clearly explained, it also seems that Bentley hopes to preserve and learn from the open-source culture that Cesium has embodied, with its dedication to openness, performance and solving problems for thousands of users in many different industries.

While I still have my doubts about the potential size of market for digital twins within the building sector – insofar as there are so many buildings but the cost of making a twin is high – when you scale up the geo level and start talking about managing assets like roads, rail, national grids and power stations, then digital twins and asset management start to make a lot more sense.

The acquisition of Cesium is a major coup for Bentley, which will not only help it in its historic markets, but also introduce it (literally) to a whole new digital world

The post Geo whiz: Bentley acquires Cesium appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Bentley Systems wasn’t wasting time at its recent YII conference, hammering home its ‘open’ approach to data. The message from Bentley’s execs was clear: the company is putting its weight behind openness— the sub text being that some of its competitors are not.

The emphasis was hard to miss. In the first two keynote presentations alone, led by new CEO Nicolas Cumins and CTO Julien Moutte, the word ‘open’ was used a staggering 60 times.

While AI also got a strong showing with 47 mentions, it was obvious that Bentley was speaking to customers, and not trying to impress investors. The message? Openness isn’t just a token word; it’s a cornerstone of Bentley’s strategy. “Your data is your data always,” said Cumins.

Moutte outlined the three pillars of Bentley’s open approach: open standards where everybody that was granted access to the data can read and understand it; open source, where every developer can leverage that data; and open APIs, where users are free to take their data out whenever they want, instead of just being able to query it.

Cumins also touched on the complexity of infrastructure projects, which involve multiple organisations, teams, and disciplines “This complexity makes it impossible for you to rely on any single system or single vendor. Instead, you need an ecosystem that enables flexibility, integration and interoperability across different tools and platforms,” he said.

He also addressed a common concern among customers: “Don’t get locked in,” he said. “Make sure you retain control of your data.”

As AEC firms navigate the transition from files to a data-lake world, this message should resonate more than ever. With proprietary files (DWG / DGN / RVT) at least drawings and models could be accessed via Open Design Alliance (ODA) libraries. With proprietary databases, access is granted only via APIs, which are under the control of the vendor.

“We are not creating another silo,” said Cumins.

Looking ahead, Bentley is focused not just on the present, but on the long-term future. Infrastructure is built to last. “Our users must assure that this data, their data, remains accessible for decades to come, and we believe this is only possible with a truly open approach,” said Moutte.

At the heart of Bentley’s open strategy is the iTwin platform, a suite of APIs and services designed to help AECO firms develop digital twin applications for designing, building, and operating infrastructure assets. iTwin integrates data from various sources—specs, drawings, CAD and BIM models, reality captures, sensor data, inspection records, and more.

The platform is built on a schema specifically designed for infrastructure. While the majority of this schema is open-source, one component — the Parasolid geometry modelling kernel —is proprietary, as it is owned by Siemens.

As Cumins explained, “The schema goes beyond basic data exchange, ensuring that data isn’t just accessible, but its meaning can also be understood, whether you’re dealing with materials or structures or subsurface data.”

He emphasised that this schema helps engineers, constructors, and organisations maximise the value of their data. “We’re not keeping it to ourselves. We actively encourage others in the industry to adopt the schema. This is about moving the entire infrastructure sector forward together.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Cumins described AI as a “paradigm shift” for the infrastructure sector, highlighting the massive scale of data generated during the design, construction, and operational phases. “It makes infrastructure a prime area where AI can have the greatest impact,” he said.

Bentley’s investment in AI dates back several years. In 2018, the company acquired machine learning and IoT developer AIworx, which former CTO Keith Bentley described as an “acqui-hire,” meaning it was made primarily for the talent. Since then, that talent has driven several successful AI use cases, primarily in asset operations. These include automatic object classification in reality meshes and using computer vision, IoT sensors, and machine learning for predictive maintenance—detecting issues before they lead to failures.

Many of these technologies now fall under Bentley Asset Analytics, a new product line that uses AI to provide insights into the condition of infrastructure assets. “This approach is especially important for critical infrastructure like bridges and dams, where monitoring and maintenance are key to ensuring long-term safety and performance,” said Mike Campbell, Chief Product Officer, Bentley Systems.

The portfolio includes Blyncsy, which utilises crowd-sourced dashcam footage and machine learning models to automate roadway maintenance and asset inventory. “AI can help identify roadside assets and assess their conditions, everything from a broken stop sign to a faulty streetlight to a fresh pothole,” explained Mike Schellhase, VP of asset analytics at Bentley. “These insights feed directly into the infrastructure digital twin, the iTwin, and are presented in iTwin Experience to show the latest conditions and context.”

Another product, OpenTower iQ, uses drone imagery, data, and AI to manage telecom towers throughout their lifecycle, handling everything from data acquisition and visualisation to structural analysis, site design, and maintenance.

Bentley plans to expand these solutions to cover a broader range of asset types, offering owner-operators increasingly advanced AI-powered tools.

Now, the company is pushing AI further into the design phase, using generative AI to automate repetitive tasks.

The first of a new generation of AI-powered design tools is OpenSite+, which is used for civil site design (including roadways, parking lots, and buildings).

The software features a co-pilot experience that taps into knowledge stored in documentation, specifications, and 3D site models through natural language interactions. “We can ask questions like, ‘Can I build a hotel in this area?’ or ‘Do I have enough parking to meet my requirements?’” said Francois Valois, VP of civil infrastructure at Bentley.

“At this stage [in the design process], we don’t know if our layout is optimal, so we build a neural network that evaluates thousands of alternatives to find the best one, optimising costs while meeting engineering requirements,” Valois explained. The software also offers AI-powered earthwork optimisation, which Bentley has enhanced by wrapping its current engine in a neural network to make the process significantly faster.

Another key feature is automated drawing production, a hot topic in AEC as it can save so much time and money (read this AEC Magazine article). According to Bentley, drawing production can account for up to 50% of a site design project’s time, and Bentley’s AI-powered tools automate annotation, labelling, and sheeting, optimising the placement of labels and dimensions, and according to organisational standards.

Currently, drawing production isn’t built directly into OpenSite+, but rather, it’s routed through OpenSite Designer, an existing power-platform based product based on MicroStation. However, as Campbell explained by going down this route, the technology can then be made available in other power platform-based applications. Watch this space.

This process will take time, as the large language model (which Campbell playfully wants to call a “large drawing model”) has so far only been trained on tens of thousands of site plans and only from North America. “We’ve got to do that for the UK, for Australia, for all of the other places, because the standards are all different,” Campbell said. “Roadway plans have a different look and feel, right? So, we’ve got to build a model for that.”

As to where the training data has come from, Campbell explained that most of it is sourced from a licensed open-source library, though some customers have granted Bentley explicit permission to use their data. “We’re not just going and taking plans from random [customer] accounts,” he said, adding that Bentley keeps track of the provenance of every data set used. If a company decides to withdraw its data, Bentley will retrain the model accordingly.

In the future, customers will be able to train the AI model on their own data. “Say you’ve got 6,000 site plans—you can put them into your own local, retrained version of the model, and that will be yours and yours alone.”

As for the future of AI at Bentley, Campbell hinted at broader applications. “Instead of using AI to generate a site, could we use AI to generate other designs, a bridge design, for example, optimise a road for – not just the obvious ones like curvature and safety, but things like carbon impact and cost and time.”

“Civil engineers can imagine a certain section of the design space. AI can imagine a much broader design space,” Campbell added. “The good news is that in engineering, we’re governed by rules of physics and standards and safety factors and all those kinds of things, so that limits it, but still, it’s bigger than what a typical engineer can think about.”

Desktop deployment

Beyond AI, one of the most significant aspects of OpenSite+ is that it’s a completely new type of application. It’s iTwin-native, so it writes directly to an iModel without needing to go through intermediary formats like DGN. Unlike many modern applications, it’s also a desktop application, rather than running in a browser.

“We’re not yet convinced that all of these engineering workloads are going to be able to work on the cloud,” explained Campbell. “We also want to be able to take advantage of local compute. And we’ve also got our eye on these new AI processors that are coming out – NPUs – and we want to be able to take advantage of that.”

OpenSite+ works both online and offline, syncing changes (deltas) when connectivity is restored. Bentley is taking the same desktop/iTwin-native approach with its new visualisation tool, Advanced Visualization, which is built on Unreal Engine (more on this later).

Campbell acknowledges that more tools are in the pipeline, either going through validation or still in the research phase, and they will all follow this same framework.

With many new AEC software tools from startups running in the browser, we asked Campbell if this would influence Bentley’s acquisition strategy. “Not necessarily, but it would be a consideration,” he said. “We certainly look at architecture [of the software].”

He also admitted that technical integration has become a key focus for Bentley, which is one reason why acquisitions have slowed over the last couple of years. The priority now is ensuring that products work seamlessly together. “The idea of convergence and integration, ensuring that data flows smoothly across applications and the lifecycle, and informs the infrastructure digital twin—that’s the goal,” Campbell emphasised.

Back into BIM?

Bentley once held a strong position in architecture, especially in the early 2000s with MicroStation and GenerativeComponents, a pioneering computational design tool that preceded Grasshopper.

However, in recent years, the company has shifted its focus away from this market. Given the growing interest in next-generation BIM tools, the question arises: does Bentley have aspirations to get back into BIM?

“Our focus right now is absolutely on horizontal infrastructure, and there’s plenty there to keep us busy,” said Campbell.

“But I’m reluctant to say never, especially in light of the sentiment of the broader AEC ecosystem. In particular, I’m thinking about open letters, I’m thinking about the AEC spec [AEC Future Software Specification]. I’m thinking about what their vision is for the tools they’ll use in the future. And I’m thinking about the tools that we’re building. And when I read that spec and I look at our strategy, it’s not dissimilar. It’s not a slam dunk, but we’re in the ballpark.

“The data lake, the elements of openness, design in context and at scale. That’s in the AEC spec.”

Geospatial – giving assets context

Last month, out of the blue, Bentley Systems acquired Cesium, developer of an industry cherished 3D geospatial platform – Cesium ion – with an ecosystem of open standards, including Cesium.JS and 3D Tile technology. (To learn more about the acquisition read this AEC Magazine article).

“With the acquisition of Cesium, we are now able to provide a 3D geospatial view of infrastructure,” said Cumins. “We are effectively changing the vantage point of an infrastructure digital twin, from the engineering model of the infrastructure asset to the planet Earth, upon which we geolocate the engineering model and all the necessary data from the surrounding built and natural environments.”

However, as Cumins explained, perhaps the most significant aspect of the acquisition is that Cesium as a company, perfectly aligns with Bentley’s vision of open standards and interoperability.

“The combination of Cesium plus iTwin enables developers to seamlessly align 3D geospatial data with engineering, subsurface, IoT, reality, and enterprise data to create digital twins with astonishing user experiences that scale from vast infrastructure networks to the millimetre-accurate details of individual assets—viewed from land, sky, and sea, from outer space to deep below the Earth’s surface to support engineering workflows.”

Cesium’s 3D Tile technology makes light work of huge geospatial datasets by streaming only what the user needs for any given view.

It uses a concept called hierarchical level of detail (HLOD), where you basically have a tree of tiles – the root being the least detailed version, the branches adding more detail, and the leaves having the highest resolution.

3D Tiles can handle a whole smorgasbord of 3D geospatial data including point clouds, reality models (derived from photogrammetry), and 3D buildings. Through its recent AECO Tech Preview Program it can also handle BIM models (IFC and Autodesk Revit), complete with metadata which can be used for querying, filtering, styling, and analytics.

The long-term plan is to unite the iTwin and Cesium Ion platforms, but as Patrick Cozzi, CEO of Cesium and now chief platform officer at Bentley, explained nothing will be done without input from the community. The potential is limitless, he said. “We can add voxels for biometric visualisation, for subsurface, we can add Gaussian splats for higher visual quality for point clouds; we can do temporal tiles to help show the change in construction sites over time.”

Building on this geospatial focus, Bentley announced a new strategic partnership with Google which will integrate Google’s comprehensive repository of 3D geospatial data with Cesium and Bentley’s iTwin platform.

“Consider a large urban development project where multiple infrastructure systems are used – roads, bridges, energy and water networks – that must be coordinated across various stakeholders,” said Cumins. “By integrating Google’s vast 3D geospatial data with Bentley Cesium technology and iTwin platform stakeholders can visualise their assets, both existing and plan in full real-world context.”

Advanced Visualization

Cesium 3D Tiles and Google 3D Tiles play a key role in Advanced Visualization, a new product from Bentley powered by Unreal Engine, designed to overcome the challenges of creating immersive, interactive, and photorealistic infrastructure experiences.

This software integrates seamlessly with iTwin for live access to up-to-date project data, enabling users to navigate massive models in real time using Cesium 3D Tiles.

As Greg Demchak, VP, emerging technologies group at Bentley explained, users can enrich their scenes with additional context and content: “Context in the form of Google 3D tiles, and content in the form of easy to place trees, cars, scale, figures and equipment.”

Advanced Visualization functions either as an out-of-the-box solution or as a flexible platform for building custom applications and is currently in Early Access.

Up front carbon analysis

One of the key challenges in achieving sustainability on infrastructure projects is the time-consuming nature of carbon reporting, which is typically handled by specialists.

Kelvin Saldanha, associate director at WSP, elaborated: “Once you’re ready to measure carbon, it needs to go through a rigorous quantity take-off process, including design compilation and data cleansing, before that data can be used in third-party software.”

This process can cause significant delays. As Saldanha noted, “A lot of times that delay means that the design team doesn’t know what the carbon score is until the design is very mature, and you kind of miss the opportunity to reduce your carbon score.”

He emphasised that the best opportunity to make a meaningful impact on carbon reduction is in the early stages of a project’s design cycle.

WSP has been testing new carbon analysis capabilities in iTwin Experience through Bentley’s Early Access Program, which Saldanha said gives the design team much-needed transparency in the earlier phases of a project. “Continuous calculations during the design process allow for accurate carbon reports to be generated much earlier in the project lifecycle,” he added.

What truly sets Carbon Analysis apart, according to Saldanha, is the software’s visualisation capabilities. “Instead of sifting through spreadsheets and tables, designers can now exchange data directly with EC3, view heat maps, and interact with them to quickly identify where they’ve got carbon intensive features on their project, and then they can target those.”

Bentley’s new Carbon Analysis capabilities are available to iTwin Experience users at no additional cost, though a separate licence is required for carbon assessment calculators like EC3 or OneClickLCA.

Conclusion

While many AEC software companies talk openness, few demonstrate the same level of commitment as Bentley – though open standards, open source and open APIs.

At YII, Bentley’s executives made this abundantly clear with deliberate, impactful messaging: “Don’t get locked in,” “Your data is your data,” and “We’re not creating another silo.”,

This was a strong signal to customers that the keys to their data must remain in their hands, a crucial point as the AEC industry transitions from file-based systems to data lake environments.

Of course, Bentley’s approach isn’t purely altruistic; as a company with shareholders now, it stands to benefit from the industry moving towards storing data in its model wrapper.

And while third parties can choose to use the open specification to create an iModel / iTwin independently, Bentley has a suite of mature data management, authoring and analysis tools and services ready to go.

But with this open approach it’s clear that Bentley is playing the long game—a smart strategy considering the long lifecycle of infrastructure assets.

Cumins pointed out that the software and platform used to manage these assets will evolve considerably over time. “So, by ensuring that our systems remain open, we allow organisations to adopt new technologies and innovations while still being able to access and build on their historical data,” he said.

Of course, it’s possible that future platforms may not even be developed by Bentley, but the key takeaway for customers investing in the Bentley iTwin ecosystem is this: they will always have the freedom to choose.

The post Bentley Systems: the promise of data freedom appeared first on AEC Magazine.

WZMH Architects has launched Giraffe, an independent software company aimed at enhancing efficiency, sustainability, and collaboration in building design and construction.

This launch builds on the foundation laid by sparkbird, the firm’s R&D lab established in 2017 to drive innovation in IoT (Internet of Things), design efficiency, modularity, and sustainability.

Giraffe takes this one step further by blending practical architectural and construction expertise with advanced AI and digital twin technology. It tackles critical challenges in the AEC industry, including fragmented design processes, inconsistent standards and documentation, workforce shortages, and the need for greater automation.

The company offers eight technology solutions.

doton – a digital construction measurement and inventory tracking solution that utilises standard camera technology and unique markers to enhance measurement accuracy, locate and determine the final placement of materials and construction site safety.

ska-ana – a tool for autonomous site navigation, real-time data collection, and remote construction monitoring, designed to reduce operational time and increase efficiency.

AiM (Ai Massing) – an AI-driven planning tool for rapid generation and adjustment of real estate development massing models, integrating creative vision with technical specifications.

PARRiT – a centralised platform for managing design and furniture information, facilitating real-time updates and collaboration across project stakeholders.

SOVAi – a site surveying tool that leverages advanced environmental analysis to provide ‘rapid, comprehensive’ BIM models and reports, enhancing project planning efficiency.

PLAiNNED – an AI-powered app that simplifies architectural design by quickly generating building code-compliant layouts for complex building components, epitomizing efficient ‘design by spreadsheet’.

mySUN – an ‘eco-conscious gaming app’ that tracks and suggests improvements to users’ environmental footprint, encouraging sustainable daily choices through automated activity.

VOLPAi – an AI-powered application that addresses RFI management in the construction industry by expediting responses to improve project flow and serving as an educational resource on design and construction practices.

Giraffe has undertaken pilot tests and collaborations with firms such as Infrastructure Ontario, RBC, Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure and Operations and major general contractors and subcontractors.

It is currently carrying out ongoing beta testing and plans for commercialization by 2025.

Find this article plus many more in the Sept / Oct 2024 Edition of AEC Magazine

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