Impact Report 2025: AI Powering Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Push, While Bridging Capacity Gap

With its extreme heat, seismicity, and salt-rich corrosive soils, the Saudi Arabian port city of Jazan is no easy place to build. So, when a huge grain warehouse in the city started to sink, crack, and warp, it presented a major—and potentially eye-wateringly expensive—problem to fix.

Local engineering firm GeoStruXer stepped in, harnessing data, 3D digital modeling, and artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover what the ground was hiding—a vast, slowly dissolving salt dome—and design a rehabilitation plan. First, GeoStruXer used Bentley Systems’ PLAXIS software. The advanced 3D application helps engineers model how soil, foundations, and structures interact, and GeoStruXer used it to come up with a calibrated ground model. Then the team turned to AI, running an algorithm to reveal how many micropiles the foundation needed and where, a move that automated what would otherwise have taken months of manual engineering.

The food security warehouse (bottom left) at Jazan City Port was saved by GeostruXer using Bentley software.

GeoStruXer’s design not only rescued the sinking 12,000-square-meter grain warehouse, a critical food security hub for over 1.5 million people, it slashed material use and carbon emissions by over 70% and saved more than $2 million in costs. Bentley hailed it as an example of how engineers can use AI alongside Bentley applications to deliver more resilient infrastructure.

The Jazan warehouse project, which was a recipient of the Bentley-Envision Award for Sustainable Infrastructure at the 2025 Year in Infrastructure conference in Amsterdam, is just one example of sustainable infrastructure highlighted in Bentley’s Impact Report 2025. The annual report showcases how Bentley is shrinking its own environmental footprint and helping users develop more sustainable, resilient infrastructure—increasingly with the help of AI.

For example, a project from geothermal company Fervo Energy shows how AI data centers can tap geothermal energy to power their operations and lower their carbon footprint. “This really is the frontier of a whole new wave of potential renewable energy technology that could transform the power system, both within the U.S. and in other places around the world,” said Graham Grant, CEO of Seequent, the Bentley subsurface company. Fervo Energy’s geothermal project won a Going Digital Award at the 2025 Year in Infrastructure conference.

“In 2025, we have seen infrastructure organizations move beyond investing in AI for their business functions and begin exploring its potential for their core engineering work,” Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins said in a message introducing the report. “They recognize, as we do, that AI can be a force multiplier for every infrastructure professional.”

Cumins called AI a “step-change” in productivity that will help close the gap between demand for better infrastructure and the engineering capacity to deliver it. He also addressed sustainability questions about AI’s rapid adoption. Acknowledging the paradox that AI data centers strain infrastructure, Cumins stressed the mandate to apply AI to optimize the very systems it relies on, turning the challenge into the solution.

That’s why Bentley has embedded AI capabilities into its core Open Applications—automating time-consuming tasks like the generation of 2D drawings from 3D models—and made it easier for infrastructure organizations to use AI to tap into valuable data from past projects and managed in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud.

In their message accompanying the report, Angela Curry, Bentley’s chief compliance officer, and Chris Bradshaw, chief sustainability and education officer, hailed how Bentley colleagues have learned “how to incorporate AI into their daily work while advancing these capabilities for our users.” 

The report lists multiple examples of Bentley’s commitment to trustworthy AI.

• In 2026, Bentley launched a co-innovation initiative for users to shape the development of trustworthy AI for infrastructure.

• Bentley’s Data Agreement Registry protects intellectual property and gives users full control over their data, including if and how it’s used for AI training.

• Bentley’s AI Community of Practice, a place to experiment with and debate the best AI tools, grew to over 700 members.

• In 2025, Bentley launched the AI in Infrastructure report, which polled leading infrastructure professionals across the globe on their firms’ readiness for AI.

• Bentley’s annual puzzle-solving OCTO Coding Challenge in 2025 explored how AI can change the way participants think about coding.

Beyond the impact of Bentley’s technology and governance, the report also details the company’s commitment to its operational footprint, its people, and its communities—from achieving carbon neutrality to fostering a highly recommended workplace and empowering the next generation of engineers.