In late September 2025, thousands of residents in Novi, Michigan and the surrounding area were forced to contend with days of disruption following a severe water main break. Some homes and businesses faced total water outages. Others were issued a ‘boil water advisory’, recommending they boil the water from their taps due to potential contamination that might make it unsafe to drink.

This kind of scenario is all too common and causes real headaches for communities. It’s hugely damaging for utility providers, too. Alongside the significant costs of a major repair job, they are also likely to experience an angry backlash from customers and, in some cases, financial penalties from regulators.

But even more problematic for utilities is the impact of slow but steady leakage of water from their networks. According to estimates from strategy firm McKinsey, some 14% to 18% of total treated potable water in the US is lost through leaks before it even reaches customers. In England, the figure is around 19%, according to a 2024 report by the UK Environment Agency. In other words, it simply makes sound business sense to catch and fix small leaks before they lead to major problems.

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Technology can help, but to tackle leaks effectively, utilities need to take a two-pronged approach to its deployment, according to Peter Delgado, director of commercial excellence at Oldcastle Infrastructure, which is part of CRH, a global provider of building materials for transportation and critical infrastructure.

Says Delgado: “You need prediction technology, so that you know where leaks are most likely to occur across the many miles of network that you manage. And you need leak detection technology that enables you to pinpoint the location and size of leaks.”

Oldcastle Infrastructure’s CivilSense solution, he claims, is the only solution to enable customers to adopt this bilateral approach and address both sides of the coin. To do so, Oldcastle Infrastructure relies on whitelabelling technology from two other companies and combining these with its CivilSense software platform.

First, CivilSense uses AI-driven predictive analysis from Boston, Massachusetts-based VODA.ai to flag sections of a network that are at higher risk of pipe failure or breakage, based on its analysis of geographic information systems (GIS), climate and infrastructure asset data. These analyses include the ranking of different areas of often vast water networks by risk.

Next comes the deployment by frontline teams of acoustic sensors from Bicester, UK-based FIDO Tech. These sensors detect, locate and size actual leaks in real time and are magnetically attached to valves via manholes in areas of particular concern for a monitoring period typically lasting a day or two, but sometimes up to a week, Delgado says. They are engineered to ‘listen’ for the particular sounds and vibrations produced by a leaking pipe and often at levels far beyond the limits of human hearing and AI-driven analysis of that data can pinpoint a leak to an accuracy of around three metres, says Delgado. That data is also fed back into CivilSense.

Finally, CivilSense is the platform where both types of intelligence – predictive analytics and leak detection – are aggregated and visualised for utility workers, in the form of dashboards and maps accessible from any device, including the smartphones and tablets typically used by workers in the field. In this way, utilities can respond proactively to leaks before they become severe, prioritise repairs, allocate frontline resources to repair jobs and plan preventative maintenance – not to mention avoid the cost, waste and disruption of digging in a location where no leak actually exists.

It’s important to remember that much of this infrastructure is hidden away, deep underground and that’s part of the problem, says Delgado. “The ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ nature of leaks can lead to a reactive mindset, but that’s no solution to the challenges that utilities increasingly face.” Water systems are ageing in the US and many other countries, he points out, with infrastructure such as pipes and valves fast approaching the end of its shelf-life.

Couple that with the impacts of rising demand for water among consumers, extreme weather events and ageing workforces in which many skilled utilities engineers are nearing retirement, he says, and you’ve got a perfect storm that simply demands a more proactive mindset.

“Without more innovative solutions, without new technologies, the current approaches used by utilities providers to deal with leaks will soon prove hopelessly inadequate,” he warns.

Indeed, if you ask the people of Novis, Michigan, they would probably tell you that the utilities industry reached that point some time ago.

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Ask Jake Williams about some of the highlights of his time as a senior visualisation manager at global office space provider WeWork, and it’s likely he’ll mention 37 Avenue Trudaine in Paris.

Long before its official opening in February 2023, Williams and his team were set the challenge of producing high resolution stills and animations depicting what this building would look like once it had been renovated and fitted out to WeWork’s specifications.

The visualisation project involved an abundance of historic detail and planned enhancements for the team to capture. Situated in the 9th arrondissement, and just a stone’s throw from the Sacre Coeur, WeWork 37 Avenue Trudaine covers 78,500 square feet of a handsome period building, a former school dating back to 1863. The workspace is arranged over six floors and features an eye-catching glass dome atrium that floods the ground floor with natural light.

Putting together visualisations of proposed WeWork sites from architectural models (typically built in Revit) and from interior design plans was a routine process for Williams and his team. But what stands out for him about this particular project is that they were able to apply all their creative skills to the job at hand, without worrying about being hampered by technology constraints.

Visualisation without constraints

This was down to a new approach to visualisation at WeWork pioneered by Williams, and enabled by Sherpa from Escape Technology, a cloud-resource management tool. Sherpa securely provides everything a studio needs – workstations, storage, render nodes and so on – via the cloud and is controlled through a simple dashboard.

Prior to the implementation of Sherpa, artistic compromises often had to be made, says Williams: objects and textures sometimes had to be downsized; file sizes had to be carefully managed; renders needed to be sent early in order to meet deadlines.

Now, for the first time, WeWork’s visualisation team wasn’t having to rely on an on-premise server and render farm. Williams wasn’t distracted from the project by the need to manage this hardware himself. And the team weren’t forced to optimise scenes so that the render farm could handle them.

“We were so excited,” he recalls. “For the first time, things were working really well from a technology standpoint. We could just render an animation, adding compute power if necessary, and not worry about how long it was going to take. Everything worked faster,” he says.

We didn’t have to constantly worry whether renders were going to be finished by our deadline. We didn’t have to worry that we were rendering too many objects or details in a scene

“Of course, the building was a big factor. It’s a great building! But there was also a feeling of stress lifting. We didn’t have to constantly worry whether renders were going to be finished by our deadline. We didn’t have to worry that we were rendering too many objects or details in a scene because now we were able to scale up the render farm on demand to meet the project requirements. And what we were getting out at the end of a render were better-looking, more detailed images.”

In other words, here was an opportunity to spread their wings and let their talents fly. In the past, says Williams, the team might rely more on Photoshop for some of the night and day views. Now they could deliver two or more fully rendered views of a space, for example, and at higher resolution than before.

“We couldn’t have done something like that with our previous off-the-shelf set-up. It would just have taken too long. But Sherpa just unlocked another level for us,” he says.

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No more compromises

For a start, Sherpa eliminated the need for visualisation experts at WeWork to work on company premises, in offices filled with workstations and render farms. Instead, the Sherpa solution defined for WeWork by engineers at Escape Technology – all ex-industry and/or VFX/ design system administrators – is entirely cloud-based. That was an immediate advantage during the Covid-19 pandemic, but one with long-lasting benefits.

Every visualisation artist has their own cloud-based workstation, which they can access from a standard laptop. The files and software reside in the cloud, with Sherpa sending and receiving pixels, rather than files, between the user’s device and the cloud. In this way, the artist works exactly as they would if they were using a fully fledged workstation, but from any location they choose.

Workstations delivering Deadline, 3DS Max and Corona Renderer among other packages run on servers in the cloud at two AWS (Amazon Web Services) locations: one on the US East Coast and one in the UK. Data storage, meanwhile, is provided by LucidLink, which facilitates a file interface to cloud storage, streaming data securely and eliminating the need for creative teams to download and synchronise files.

This has proved a very successful approach for Escape Technology clients looking to offer hybrid working options for their creative teams, according to Nick Mathews, business development director at Escape Technology. “So some users could be working on physical machines, and others on cloud workstations, and LucidLink can tie it together,” he explains.

For Williams, a big advantage to this approach was the ability to scale up and down, as requirements demanded. Via Sherpa’s UI, he was able to add new render nodes as needed – for example, if a project required a fly-through animation of a new WeWork site. Once the work was complete, he could then scale back down.

The same approach applied to workstations. Using Sherpa, Williams was able to provision higher-spec workstations on an as-needed basis. He introduced a threetier system for machines: 128 GB for ‘hero’ projects, 64 GB for more routine work and 32 GB for small workloads – each with variable processing speeds.

“When we did our original planning for Sherpa, we had workstations budgeted that were the same as our physical workstations. We assumed that because we needed 128 GB of memory in our real workstations, that’s what we should have in Sherpa too. Once I got familiar with the interface, I realised we could fluidly change on a daily basis, which saved us a lot of money.”

The visualisation project for WeWork 37 Avenue Trudaine was the first completed using the new Sherpa set-up. Williams has since left WeWork to run his own visualisation agency and pursue his creative passions – but he’ll always have Paris. As he reflects, with evident satisfaction: “The team was super excited to be able to do something on that scale, that we just hadn’t been able to do before.”

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