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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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Europe Can’t Rebuild Its Infrastructure Without AI and Connected Data

In 2032, Poland will open Port Polska, a single multimodal transit hub that neatly ties together a massive infrastructure package, including an airport that will ultimately handle 60 million passengers per year; roughly 500 kilometers of new high-speed rail linking Poland’s major cities of Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, and Wrocław; and a co-located cargo hub with direct connections to the country’s highway network. Mateusz Dziektarz, the program’s senior data and BIM administrator, said travelers will be able to reach major cities or cross the whole country in around three hours.  The numbers behind the undertaking are already staggering. Port Polska is running 83 projects in parallel—46 at the airport and 37 on the rail network—for a combined investment value of roughly €30 billion. In three and a half years, the program has generated 7.7 million documents, accumulated nearly 40 terabytes of data, and put 5,700 engineers using infrastructure software on a single platform. “The backbone of the process in our case is ProjectWise,” Dziektarz said, referring to the Bentley Systems software that holds the data and knits the program together. Port Polska is the type of transformative infrastructure project that defined the conversations at Illuminate 2026 in Berlin, the third stop

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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. 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,

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AI Will Not Modernize U.S. Infrastructure Without Better, Actionable Data

A Warning From 20 Feet Below In 2010, workers rebuilding the World Trade Center in New York City uncovered an unexpected piece of the past. About 20 feet below ground, excavation machinery struck weathered timber buried at the edge of the site. It turned out to be part of an 18th-century sailboat, or sloop, that once sailed the Hudson River and was later used as landfill as Manhattan expanded.  For historians, it was a remarkable find. For engineers, it was a reminder of a more practical problem: Infrastructure is at times still designed with incomplete knowledge of what lies below the surface, and that uncertainty can be expensive.  “Sometimes design has to proceed without the required high-quality subsurface data, and we make refinements and pivots as we go along. We take measured risks but may still find things that are massive, and we might end up blowing the budget and schedule,” said Rizwan Baig, chief engineer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “Not knowing the surprises under our build-environment before breaking ground and third party risk is what concerns me.”  That concern framed one of the clearest messages at the Transforming Infrastructure Performance (TIP) NYC Summit 2026. First hosted a decade ago

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Meet The Architects Who Want to Change How the World Gets Built

Oliver Thomas spent two decades watching architects struggle with their software—so he started a movement. The British architect, who worked at major global firms before launching his own companies, founded the Archi-Tech Network (ATN), a global community for architects, technologists, and designers. ATN is focusing on the intersection of architecture, technology, and entrepreneurship, and Thomas’ mission is to help a new generation of architects develop useful technical and entrepreneurial skills. Thomas, who serves as ATN’s CEO, is also pushing software companies to make their products more open and interoperable, so teams can work better together with seamless workflows. The movement is striking a nerve. ATN has reached more than 100,000 people through its training, podcasts, videos, and events. In March, ATN held a week full of events in London, including the first ATN Summit in the city’s trendy Shoreditch district. More than 500 architecture activists gathered for two days in the area’s Protein Studios to demand software be built around interoperability and open data, debate the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in design, and confront the industry’s big challenges, including how technology will reshape the built world. “A lot of people are unhappy with the tools they’re using,” Thomas says.

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