In a wide-ranging conversation on The Infrastructure Podcast, Nicholas Cumins, CEO of Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, talked about the challenges and opportunities facing the infrastructure sector. He addressed the shortage of engineering talent, explained the need for open data standards, and discussed the role of AI in the field.
Cumins highlighted growing global demand for resilient infrastructure, especially amid challenges like rapid urbanization, economic growth, and the energy transition. But he emphasized that the industry’s capacity is strained by a lack of engineers, making technology essential to bridging the gap. “It’s great to be in infrastructure engineering software because software is of course one of the keys to help,” he said. He added that tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twins are transforming how infrastructure is designed, built, and operated.
Cumins said engineers and infrastructure owners and operators need for solutions that extend the lifespan of existing assets like roads and bridges, improve efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, and make them more resilient. As examples of the Bentley’s focus on sustainable innovation and resilience, he pointed to the company’s new asset analytics offerings using AI to monitor infrastructure conditions at scale. One of them, Blyncsy, uses crowdsourced images from dashcams to monitor road conditions in the U.S. and in the U.K. Another, OpenTower iQ, sends data and images from drones, satellites, Internet of Things (IoT), and other sources to digital twins of cell phone towers and then uses AI and machine learning to generate automated reports and drawings, and integrate them into plans for upgrades, inspections, and maintenance. “AI is absolutely part of the solution,” Cumins said.
The discussion also touched on Bentley’s partnerships, including a notable collaboration with Google to integrate vast geospatial data into infrastructure projects. “[Google] basically created, and they are curating on an ongoing basis, a digital twin of the planet Earth,” Cumins said. “The partnership that we have with Google is actually making that digital twin of the planet Earth available for infrastructure professionals so that they can tap into this vast amount of geospatial data to better design and better or better operate infrastructure assets.” Cumins said that Google is also using 3D Tiles, an open standard that have been created by Cesium, the 3D geospatial company Bentley acquired last year.
Cumins praised open data standards, such as 3D Tiles, as critical to improving data reuse across the infrastructure lifecycle. “We need to make sure that data is flowing very freely from one engineering software to the next, from one phase of the infrastructure lifecycle to the next, from one infrastructure organization to the next,” he said. He stressed that engineers should never be forced “to keep data in whatever entry software they’re using or whatever collaboration software they’re using…This is really about how we make all of that data available so that we can drive better insights [and] make better decisions in order to solve that engineering resources capacity gap that we’re facing as a as a sector.”
Looking ahead, Cumins described AI as a game-changer for the sector. He envisions AI automating mundane tasks and enabling engineers to focus on creative problem-solving, ultimately improving project outcomes. But he also stressed that the AI revolution must happen in a “non-destructive” way and that new AI capabilities should not force engineers “to change completely the way they work. If not, they won’t, they won’t be adopted,” he said.
Cumins took over as CEO the same year as Bentley celebrated its 40th anniversary and two years after the formerly family-owned business went public. He told listeners to “step back and remind ourselves of how the company has successfully leveraged multiple paradigm shifts to advance infrastructure engineering software, whether it was the personal computer or Internet or cloud computing or digital twins.”
Said Cumins: “It’s a great source of inspiration [and] obviously a great foundation to build on…What we’re trying to do here is to basically get the best of both worlds. As a former family-owned business, we want to keep the long view on things…and we want to invest for the long run, and then as a publicly traded company, we have now more firepower to accelerate that vision.”
He underscored the company’s commitment to helping infrastructure professionals tackle global challenges. “You’re solving some of the world’s biggest problems and we are proud to be supporting you for the past 40 years we have been in the business of leveraging software to help you,” he concluded.
