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Engineers Built a Bridge Inspection Training App in Three Days. It Could Help Fix America’s Decades-Long Infrastructure Crisis.

America has more than 600,000 bridges, and a growing number are approaching the end of their useful life. More than a third, some 220,000, need major repairs or outright replacement, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the nation’s bridge infrastructure a C grade in its 2025 Infrastructure Report Card. And there’s more: The engineers trained to do the work are retiring and not being replaced fast enough. “Not enough new engineers and inspectors are entering the workforce to keep up with the rapidly growing demand for their skills,” says Barritt Lovelace, vice president of emerging technologies at global engineering firm Collins Engineers. A three-day hackathon in London offered a glimpse of a solution to start chipping away at the crisis. In May, Lovelace joined forces with Bentley Labs at Bentley Systems’ London office with a single goal: build an intuitive, virtual bridge-inspection training platform. The team used GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant, and a technique in which developers guide AI to generate software through natural-language prompts. And in just three days, they built what had previously taken six months. The result is a training app that bridge inspectors anywhere in the world can use to

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The Night the Lights Went Out: Engineering—And Experiencing—New York’s New Resilient Coastline 

On the night of October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy roared ashore in New Jersey, driving a wall of water toward one of the most densely populated coastlines in the world. New York City had braced for a flood, but what caught officials by surprise was the magnitude: The swell arrived at the peak of high tide, and the two forces together sent the East River surging over its banks with a fury no one anticipated.  As water rushed upstream, the East River crested its banks and saltwater poured into the control room of Con Edison’s East River Generation Station, located at the northern edge of Manhattan’s East Village. Several blocks inland, at Con Edison’s Avenue A substation, senior operator Donnie Wilson watched the lights on his board flicker and die as the flooded power plant disconnected from the grid. “It was a scary situation just to sit in the dark,” he recalls. “I never experienced anything like that.”  Con Edison is New York City’s largest utility. Its electrical system connects more than 3.5 million customers to energy sources and serves almost 40% of New York State’s electric demand, while covering only about 1% of the state’s geographic footprint.  When the storm hit, firefighters

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Verdantix: Bentley Conference Spotlights Infrastructure’s Coming Data Crisis and Points to Solutions

At the Bentley Systems Illuminate Berlin 2026 conference, infrastructure engineers and technology leaders met to confront a massive infrastructure challenge already visible in the numbers: Europe faces €12 trillion in infrastructure investment needs by 2040.  Independent research and advisory firm Verdantix, which covers industrial and infrastructure technology, attended the event and characterized it as a significant moment for the infrastructure sector, underscoring the urgent challenges facing the industry. In a report following the conference, Verdantix analysts Sophie Planken-Bichler and Annemarie Briggs highlighted that fragmented data—including information lost at handover, siloed across disciplines, and underused in operations—remains the industry’s most consequential unsolved problem.  “The overarching message was clear: The sector is not heading towards a sudden breaking point, but a slow, predictable crisis that leaders can already quantify but are struggling to address,” the analysts wrote. “Mounting pressure from aging assets, climate stress, and growing system complexity is converging, stretching infrastructure built in the mid‑20th century far beyond its intended lifespan.”  Verdantix also highlighted the importance of themes woven throughout the conference: connected data, open standards and interoperability, and artificial intelligence (AI). The firm noted that digital twins are moving beyond design into operations, with projects such as China’s Tianshan Shengli Tunnel and the Netherlands’ A16 motorway demonstrating how digital twins, subsurface intelligence, and lifecycle data reduce risk before construction begins and feed operational insight back into future design decisions. Regarding AI, the Verdantix analysts struck a cautionary note: Technology is accelerating productivity in planning and risk analytics, but it amplifies weak data governance just as readily as strong practice. It must be guided

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From Code to Command: How AI Is Rewiring the Way Engineers Design Infrastructure

Artificial intelligence is beginning to change the daily work of civil and structural engineers. But where do AI capabilities actually stand in the industry? More than 1,000 engineers from around the world recently gathered for a Bentley Systems event to gauge the rapid advances AI is making in their sector. The session covered two distinct but connected ideas: how engineers who do not program can use AI tools to start automating their workflows, and how new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server technology could eventually make the coding step unnecessary altogether. (Bentley engineers, for example, have already successfully used AI agents to redesign a steel structure and cut its weight by 40%.) The hour-long session offered the clearest look yet at how AI is starting to shift the day-to-day work of civil and structural engineers, from Python and AI-enabled coding tools to MCP, which lets AI assistants like Claude or Copilot talk directly to engineering software. Think of MCP like a translator for AI agents: Instead of engineers spending hours clicking through menus to run calculations, they can type a plain English sentence—”optimize this steel frame”—and the AI agent does it automatically inside the STAAD software, in full compliance with the

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A Bridge in Amsterdam, Seen From a Living Room in Dublin: How Tech from Bentley and Cesium Put Dutch Infrastructure Inside a Flat in Ireland

Standing in her home on a leafy Dublin street, Liana O’Cleirigh sees what anyone else would: a red-brown armchair, a desk, and a window view of a neatly trimmed front lawn and the occasional passerby. Then there’s the 3D model of the Earth, spinning above her rug. When she extends a hand, a virtual menu pops up in the Apple Vision Pro headset covering her eyes. With a pinch of her fingers, the Earth turns and zooms in toward Amsterdam, where a 3D bridge in the city’s east comes into focus. Another pinch and she’s standing on it, at her human scale, turning around and inspecting its pillars and cables. Then she reaches above her head, grabs the sun, and drags it across the sky, turning day into night. Such adventures are a job perk for O’Cleirigh. She works as a UX designer at Bentley Systems and closely collaborates with Bentley Labs. The view inside her headset is the latest project to emerge from Bentley Labs—an innovation hub her team likens to the “wild west” of extended reality, or XR. The project, tentatively called Labs XR Prototype, is a collaborative viewer utilizing Bentley’s iTwin platform. It lets up to five

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Bentley Systems Picks Québec City for Its First Tech Hub to Bring AI to Infrastructure

A century ago, this picturesque Canadian city perched above the wide expanse of the St. Lawrence River gave the world the Québec Bridge. Still in service today, the massive steel bridge with the longest cantilever span in the world was hailed in its day as the eighth wonder of the world. More than three decades in the making, the span redefined what was possible in civil engineering and put Québec on the global infrastructure map. This week, Bentley Systems made a quieter but no less ambitious bet that Québec can do it again: this time, through artificial intelligence. The world needs more resilient infrastructure that can deal with global trends and threats like urbanization and climate change. But many observers agree that the problem won’t be solved by simply throwing more engineers at it, largely because there aren’t enough of them. Instead, Bentley believes the solution lies in applied AI used to help infrastructure professionals work more effectively and productively, and close to the people who use the infrastructure software giant’s products. To that end, Québec City Mayor Bruno Marchand cut the ribbon this week on a new Bentley technology hub, a multimillion-dollar investment in Québec City, designed to bridge

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As Storms Driven By Climate Change Batter South Africa’s Roads, AI Takes Up the Watch

Cape Town’s roads are about to get a new set of eyes. Bentley Systems just announced that the Western Cape Government’s Department of Infrastructure will deploy its AI-powered Blyncsy platform across roughly 5,000 kilometers (about 3,100 miles) of provincial roadway. The system will use crowdsourced dashcam imagery and machine-learning models to automatically flag damaged guardrails, missing street signs, faulty streetlights, vegetation creeping into sight lines, and debris—a growing concern as the province absorbs more frequent and severe storms.  The South African project marks Bentley’s first rollout in Africa and its latest step in a global push that already spans the United States and Europe.  The news comes as Western Cape officials confront a familiar global challenge: tight budgets, aging assets, and weather that no longer behaves the way it used to. Recent flooding has cut off entire towns, and the Department of Infrastructure is betting that better data—delivered faster and cheaper than traditional windshield surveys—will help it spend its R4.56 billion transport budget where it matters most.  “Providing safe and resilient infrastructure is the foundation of economic opportunity in the Western Cape, particularly as we manage the impacts of climate change on our road network,” said Johannes Neethling, the province’s

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Tulane Study Says the Gulf Is Moving To Reclaim New Orleans. A Local Engineering Firm Is Digitizing Its Defenses With Bentley Tech

A new study warns that the waters of the Gulf are poised to swallow up New Orleans, but that the challenges posed by Louisiana’s shifting coastline could position the state to become a global leader in climate adaptation strategies. The study by researchers at Tulane University found that about 125,000 years ago, the Gulf shoreline lay around 30 miles north of New Orleans. The researchers say today’s rising sea levels, amid increasing global temperatures, mean the coastline will likely reach there again in the future—moving as much as 62 miles inland and eventually putting the city, known as the Big Easy, under water. The only question is when. “With global climate now almost 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than in the mid-1800s and on track to exceed 2 degrees, we are likely already locked in for the shoreline to move that far inland,” said lead author Torbjörn Törnqvist, a professor in Tulane’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the School of Science and Engineering. The study, published in Nature Sustainability, urges state and local authorities along with businesses to begin long-term planning, including looking at potentially relocating people and investing in infrastructure north of New Orleans. The research also positions

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America’s Infrastructure Is Stuck in the Analog Era. Bentley Is Helping Bring It Into the Digital Age During Infrastructure Week in Washington, D.C.

When Otto Lynch began his career as a transmission designer in the early 1990s, laying out the 500-kilovolt power loop around Washington, D.C., required a team of 30 engineers and six months of handwritten calculations. Today, Lynch says he could do the same project in a day, on his own. “That’s not a boast,” said Lynch, head of Power Line Systems (PLS), which is part of Bentley Systems. “It’s a measure of how dramatically the tools and technology have changed.” The catch: That same line can still take years to build due to bottlenecks caused by permitting, which involves navigating a maze of agencies, hearings, and competing interests that hold a project in limbo. Closing the gap between what’s possible to design and what’s possible to deliver is the core focus of Infrastructure Week 2026, which is taking place this week in Washington, D.C. As director of infrastructure policy advancement at Bentley, Rory Linehan translates hard infrastructure problems into improved infrastructure performance on the ground, in partnership with industry associations, engineering firms, academia, and government. In February, Bentley’s Infrastructure Policy Advancement team released a white paper titled “Built to Endure” with Duke University, Microsoft, and the American Society of Civil

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Would You Cross That Bridge? AI and the Trust Problem in Infrastructure

Every time you drive over a bridge, turn on a tap for a glass of water, or flip a light switch, you are placing your trust in a complex system of infrastructure. You trust that the engineering was sound, the materials were correct, and the analysis was precise. This trust is the silent, foundational contract upon which modern society is built. It is also why the conversation about AI in infrastructure must be fundamentally different from any other domain. The rise of generative-AI has been astonishing, but it has also introduced the concept of “AI slop”—outputs that are plausible-sounding but often imprecise, inconsistent, or flat-out wrong. In many fields, this is an acceptable tradeoff for speed and creativity: a door the wrong shade of blue may offend a design eye, but it won’t physically hurt anyone. The reality of the infrastructure sector is that there is no room for approximation, let alone hallucination. A model that is 90% right is a useful start; a structural analysis that is less than 100% right is a catastrophic liability. Would you drive across a bridge that is ‘hopefully’ designed right? The gold standard of AI in civil engineering is not to provide a creative

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