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No Code, No Problem: Engineers Are Learning to Talk to Their Software

When visitors come to Quebec City, Louis-Martin Losier likes to show them the Quebec Bridge. Losier works on design software at Bentley Systems, the global tech giant developing solutions for infrastructure engineers, and the bridge is a marvel of his profession. With the longest cantilever span on Earth, the bridge spans the mighty St. Lawrence River just west of the city’s picturesque old town. When it opened more than a century ago, it was hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. “This huge bridge was a great engineering achievement,” Losier says. This year, working from the comfort of Bentley’s new office here in Quebec City, Losier showed how any engineer could recreate a design as intricate as the Quebec Bridge with the help of AI. He connected an AI agent to Bentley’s MicroStation engineering software and instructed it, in plain English, to draw the geometry of the bridge. Next, he used Bentley’s structural analysis solution called STAAD to check the result. The structure originally took 17 years to build, but Losier faithfully reconstructed it in days, reviewing the design step by step. Flattening the learning curve The technology behind the experiment is the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, an

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Build the Highway, Then Run It for Decades. Ferrovial’s Data-Driven Formula That Built a $45 Billion Infrastructure Business.

Twenty-six years ago, on the first construction project of his career, Ricardo Munguia Alvarez asked for the drawings of the building he was working on. When he laid his engineering plans for the structure, utilities, and mechanical systems over the architectural blueprint, nothing matched. “I remember going to the architect: ‘Hey, look, you’ve placed a bathroom in the middle of a structural column,’” he says. “He took a pencil and changed the whole architectural layout in front of us in 30 minutes, without considering the structure, the utilities, anything. And we just delivered, with all that uncertainty, and everybody accepted the risk, the responsibility, the cost, everything. You cannot imagine that now.” Munguia is now global head of digital construction and data management at Ferrovial, the global infrastructure company. His job, in essence, is to make sure the pencil never comes out again. A Bright Light in a Madrid Attic Ferrovial is now valued at roughly $45 billion and joined the Nasdaq-100 index last year. But the company started modestly in 1952, in an attic office in Madrid, replacing wooden railroad ties for Spain’s national railway. From there, it quickly gathered speed: By 1958, its crews were laying 18 miles

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An AI Rebuilt a 2,000-Year-Old Computer. The Real Prize Is Your Next Bridge.

Louis-Martin Losier watched as a transparent box full of delicate gears turned, and in turn recreated the motions of the cosmos. Mercury rushed around its orbit, Saturn barely crawled, and the Sun circled the Earth, like clockwork. He was running a digital simulation of the Antikythera mechanism, a miracle of ancient Greek engineering. Only a third of the original survives, and piecing together how it worked has taken scholars generations of detective work.  “It blew my mind,” says Losier, an archaeologist by training and now a senior product manager for Bentley Systems’ MicroStation, the software behind much of the world’s infrastructure. For once he wasn’t marveling at the mechanism itself, but at how easy it had been to recreate it. “Without even touching my design software, just using natural language, I was able to communicate my goal and watch this 2,000-year-old masterpiece reconstruct itself.” With an AI agent connected to MicroStation – in this case, Anthropic’s Claude – Losier simply supplied the goal, the research, and the occasional correction. No need to manually navigate MicroStation’s branching menus, no writing code. The agent built the Antikythera model under Losier’s supervision. Even a year ago, a reconstruction this detailed might have taken

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The Quebec Bridge Rises Again: AI Agent Recreates Engineering Wonder

Louis-Martin Losier has given this tour many times. When visitors come to Quebec City, he walks them from the historic Château Frontenac hotel to the Plains of Abraham battlefield, then heads down to the Quebec Bridge, which crosses the St. Lawrence River west of the city. “I tell them, this huge bridge was a great engineering achievement and people called it ‘The 8th Wonder of the World,’” he says. The bridge is just a 13-minute drive from the Bentley Systems office, where Losier serves as a senior product manager for MicroStation, the trusted design platform engineers around the world have used to lay out roads, bridges, and railways for the better part of four decades. The Quebec Bridge earned its wonder-of-the-world reputation the hard way. Nearly a kilometer long (0.62 miles), with a main span of 549 meters (1,800 feet), the steel structure took 17 years to complete. It remains the longest clear-span cantilever bridge in the world. Seven years after construction began, the original bridge collapsed into the river after lead engineers lengthened the central span without redoing their structural calculations. The extra weight buckled the superstructure, taking about 75 workers down with it. And in 1916, with the

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The Grading Problem: How AI is Solving Infrastructure’s Toughest Staffing Challenges

Look at a vacant lot in a growing or desirable location, and you may be looking at a problem. The easiest parcels have already been developed. What remains are sites with unusual topography, drainage challenges, or buried infrastructure that complicates excavating earth and building foundations. Turning these parcels into successful developments requires skills and experience. “There’s a reason it’s not been developed at this point in time,” says Josh Thompson, digital practice specialist at Stantec, one of North America’s largest engineering firms. “Because there is some sort of constraint that is making that lot hard to develop.” Thompson is talking about site development, but he could also be addressing his own industry. In civil engineering, the most significant constraint isn’t land, it’s people. The field is facing a “silver tsunami” of early retirements—just as engineering firms are struggling to find new talent. “The world needs civil engineers now more than ever,” according to Feniosky A. Peña-Mora, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He estimates that over the next decade, “approximately 17 million infrastructure workers will need to be replaced, which is more than the current entire infrastructure workforce.” That’s one reason why in 2024, Stantec became an early adopter

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America at 250: A Virtual Tour of the Landmarks That Defined a Nation

Try The Visualization The American story is, at heart, a building story. It’s 250 years of believing that what looked impossible was merely difficult. Crews strung bridges across straits deemed uncrossable, raised towers that shattered records year after year, and pushed water hundreds of miles across the desert. Now you can explore that story through a virtual 3D tour. Built with Cesium, the open-source geospatial technology, the tour maps the engineering feats that physically united and powered a growing America, from harbor to desert to skyline. Here’s your roadmap: 1. The Statue of Liberty Designed by French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886, the Statue of Liberty hides its engineering in plain sight. Beneath the 151-foot figure’s 62,000-pound hammered-copper robe is an internal iron framework engineered by Gustave Eiffel. This flexible skeleton lets the statue sway and expand in high winds and shifting temperatures. The entire monument was built in Paris, disassembled into 350 pieces, packed into 214 crates, and shipped across the Atlantic before being reassembled on its concrete pedestal—a triumph of 19th-century structural engineering and international logistics. Fun fact: The statue wasn’t always green. Her copper attire and skin, roughly two pennies thick,

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Designing Resilience: Why the Future of Infrastructure Depends on Openness and Connected Data

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2012, nature exposed the fragility of one of the world’s greatest cities. The storm flooded a critical power station and knocked out electricity across a large section of Manhattan. In neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs, a storm surge overwhelmed systems built for a different era.  New Yorkers felt the disaster’s effects for weeks after Sandy left. Subway and road tunnels flooded with salt water; parks, playgrounds, and beaches were damaged; and a gasoline shortage left drivers waiting in hours-long lines that snaked along the avenues, harkening back to the 1970s oil crisis. Dozens of people died in the storm, and the damage costs reached billions of dollars.  Taking stock of the disaster, city leaders realized they had to confront an uncomfortable reality: The future would bring more uncertainty, more extreme weather, and greater pressure on infrastructure.  https://youtu.be/AHtsTnDdlyM?si=2xVaCrmdjc7O-qOo One result of the city’s response was the Big U, an ambitious proposal for a flood-protection system wrapping around much of Lower Manhattan. In the latest episode of the Bentley Horizons podcast, we discovered that the Big U is about much more than flood walls. It’s a story about how resilient infrastructure is conceived, designed, built, and operated, and about how architects and engineers are asking their software providers to think in whole systems rather than disconnected

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New Study: How Digital Intelligence is Enabling Infrastructure Resilience for a Climate-Disrupted World

The Gulf of Mexico is coming for New Orleans, and the global infrastructure sector is paying attention. Roughly 125,000 years ago, the shoreline sat about 30 miles north of the city. Recent research predicts that rising seas could push the coast that far inland again, eventually leaving the Big Easy underwater. For now, the city’s defenses are holding, and engineers are racing to make them smarter—including one of the most critical assets, the 17th Street Canal pump station, which discharges stormwater during major storms. To make the station more reliable, resilient, and responsive, Louisiana engineering organization Forte & Tablada built a cloud-based, collaborative digital twin of the facility that gives engineers, asset managers, and emergency planners virtual insights before, during, and after storm events. The work is also expected to save 4,000 hours of engineering work. The project is among a handful of case studies included in a new global report released to coincide with London Climate Action Week, which runs June 20-28. The work in New Orleans, along with other projects that used Bentley Systems software, are included as examples for others to follow. The study, titled Beyond Reactive: How Digital Intelligence Is Enabling Infrastructure Resilience For A Climate-Disrupted

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Inside the AI Experiment That Recreated the Gherkin, One of London’s Most Iconic Towers

Before the London office tower had a name, it had a shape. Rising 41 stories, wrapped in a steel lattice, and clad in shaded glass that tapered to a point at the top, it looked like a futuristic Easter egg. But when the tower’s elongated curves caught the sun and shimmered in pale teal, Londoners saw something different: a gherkin. The affectionate name stuck.  The twisting form of the tower, officially named 30 St Mary Axe and designed by Foster + Partners, turned heads well before it was finished. It kept Londoners guessing how it would look and how it could possibly be built. The design firm’s founder, Norman Foster, had long argued that architects must advocate for new ideas. He believed the building was genuinely radical—and when it opened in 2004, much of the architectural world agreed. It was one of the most innovative and energy-efficient towers in the world, and it looked like nothing else on London’s skyline.  One of the team members working on the Gherkin was Stuart Milne, now a product manager at Bentley Systems, the global infrastructure engineering software company. Taking Foster’s maxim to heart two decades later, Milne has also done something radical: He

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The Hunt for Infrastructure’s Lost Data Comes to Philadelphia, with AI Joining the Search

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

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