A road sign clipped by a passing truck shouldn’t be hard to replace, but the reality is not so simple. The maintenance crew is often left guessing: What were the sign’s dimensions, its federal code, the grade of reflective film on its face, the company that made it, its warranty? Each of those details was recorded at some point. Yet somewhere between the drawing board and the side of the highway, the information got lost.
Nicole Williams, digital delivery practice leader at the engineering firm Kimley-Horn, is too familiar with this scenario. She said a worker should be able to “pull up your database, click on it, and it gives you all of that information. Right now, it’s not accessible.” It was one of several examples she used to stress the value of connected data during her keynote at the Cesium Developer Conference in Philadelphia in early June.
Her address resonated with the roughly 400 engineers and software developers in the room. Engineers design in data-rich 3D models, Williams explained, then flatten everything into a “2D” PDF for the contractor. By the time a project reaches the crews who operate and maintain the finished bridge or highway, much of the data is gone, and they have to start from scratch and build the information back up. “Right now, there’s a breakdown in that pipeline, so we have to start over every single time it moves to the next phase of the project,” said Williams, who consults with the Utah and Texas departments of transportation.
When digital twins of the “physical world” meet AI
She spoke to the right crowd because the event host, Cesium, has a fix in mind. The 3D geospatial company, acquired by Bentley Systems in 2024, builds open technology for streaming, gathering, and visualizing enormous amounts of 3D geospatial and other data. Its founder, Patrick Cozzi, now Bentley’s chief platform officer, said the point of bringing Cesium and Bentley together was to create an open platform where developers could assemble comprehensive digital twins of the entire physical world, from natural terrain and subsurface conditions to the roads, bridges, and buildings that people design, build, and manage over time.
Patrick Cozzi, Bentley Systems’ chief platform officer, shares the new design model formats in Cesium ion during the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference.That ambition—and the question of what happens when 3D visualization, engineering data, and AI all work together—drew developers from many different fields to the Philadelphia conference. The event, which Cozzi hosted in his hometown, featured about 80 presenters, three-quarters of them from the community. He described it as a celebration of the 3D geospatial community, built on “inspiration, idea sharing, and gaining knowledge.”
Not surprisingly, one of the biggest themes this year was artificial intelligence. “We’re seeing AI go from experimentation to production, and when you look at the opportunities that we have for building in our platform, they’re pretty endless,” Cozzi said. Experienced developers who already know how to work with Cesium can combine their domain knowledge with agentic AI to move faster, he said, while community members who have big ideas but little programming experience can lean on AI agents to build prototypes. “It’s really cool to see AI bringing new creators and new developers into the ecosystem,” Cozzi said.
Talking to engineering software in plain English
He also pointed to technologies like the model context protocol, or MCP, which is quickly becoming an open standard for AI agents that connect different applications and trigger actions between them. Think of it as a translator. MCP lets AI assistants such as Claude talk directly to engineering software, so an engineer can describe what they want in plain English, and the AI carries it out inside the application. For architects and engineers, that promises smoother handovers from design to permitting, construction, and operations, instead of losing information, such as those road sign details, at every transition.
The adoption so far among seasoned users “has been quite organic, and we’re aiming to help accelerate that,” Cozzi said. Among the steps Cesium has taken is an MCP server for Cesium ion, its platform for managing 3D geospatial data. “The combination of these agentic skills and the MCP servers do allow these chat-based agentic AIs to use Cesium quite well without having to know how to code, but just to know the end result that you want,” he said.
MCP is an open technology, and openness was another recurring theme at the conference. “It runs through the DNA of Cesium,” Cozzi said. He pointed to three pillars: engaging the community early, shipping open-source software, and storing data in open standards so it can move freely between tools. That philosophy underpins Bentley products like iTwin Engage, which blends Cesium’s data streaming with the Unreal Engine game engine to let people walk through a bridge or tunnel before it is built.
The stakes are long term. Bentley’s chief technology officer, Julien Moutte, framed it in an earlier conversation: Infrastructure assets like bridges and roads last for decades, and the data behind them needs to last just as long, which only works if that data stays open.
Much of the technical news came from Amanda Morgan, Bentley’s senior director for open standards, who co-chairs a working group at the Khronos Group, an industry consortium. She highlighted 3D Tiles 2.0, a coming standard with features such as voxels and extensions designed to bridge building information models and the wider geospatial world. A centerpiece is Gaussian splatting, a technique that turns ordinary photographs into strikingly realistic 3D scenes, capturing fine details like wires and fences that older methods miss.
3D Gaussian splats enable high-fidelity accurate visualizations of thin-and-long assets like cranes, building materials, power stations, and cell towers. This crane is depicted with Cesium for Unreal.That realism, paired with AI, was on display in one demonstration where iTwin Capture and AI worked together to track changes across sprawling Gaussian splats of an entire oil refinery. “We focus on the key technology and then we compete on the implementation,” Morgan said.
For many conference attendees, the draw was as much the crowd as the code. Steven Phillips, an independent visualization developer, called the gathering “passionate.” Epic Games’ Alban Bangerre, who traveled from Montreal, summed it up in a single word: “community.”
Williams, the expert from Kimley-Horn, said the event started with “innovative, visionary, the art of the possibility,” and then kept going. “This conference is really cool, and it’s different from anything that I ever attend, because I generally go to engineering conferences or state DOT conferences,” she said. “To be at a developers’ conference where you’re getting that front end and those intelligent minds all working towards the same goal, it’s really exciting and it’s invigorating. It’s just exciting to see and interact with people who are helping us make the impossible possible.”
