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America Has 600,000 Bridges. Engineers Using AI Just Found a Better Way to Inspect Them

When engineers from Collins Engineers arrived to inspect the landmark Robert Street Bridge in St. Paul, Minnesota, they already knew where to spot the problems because the century-old bridge had first been inspected by artificial intelligence (AI). A thorough bridge inspection typically involves workers dangling from ropes alongside the bridge, taking notes and pictures. The slow, laborious process requires rigorous safety planning and can cause major traffic disruptions. Such an inspection would be no easy task at the Robert Street Bridge, which stretches 1,429 feet across the Mississippi River in a series of concrete arches and carries thousands of commuters into downtown St. Paul. Collins Engineers had a different idea. Instead of bridge climbers, the firm dispatched drones that flew the length of the bridge and captured more than 57,000 images of its surface. Collins then used software from Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, to process the images, create a photorealistic 3D model of the bridge, and upload it to the cloud for AI analysis. The AI automatically identified, measured, and catalogued concrete cracks, spalls (the chipping and flaking of concrete surfaces), and other defects across the entire structure. By the time engineers arrived on site, they had

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Infrastructure’s AI Future Runs on Connected Data—And Human Trust

Sydney is famous for the billowing roof of its Opera House and the graceful curve of the Harbour Bridge. Less visible, but no less essential, is the infrastructure that keeps cities like it running: the tunnels, ports, water mains, and power grids. This week, more than 500 engineers, project managers, and government representatives from across Australia, New Zealand, and beyond came to Sydney’s Fullerton Hotel for Illuminate 2026 Sydney, the first event in Bentley Systems’ 2026 conference series bringing together the people who plan, build, and operate the world’s infrastructure. Illuminate moves to Mumbai and Berlin in April. The theme driving the conversations between packed sessions was straightforward: The best infrastructure projects run on connected data, artificial intelligence (AI) is only as powerful as the data beneath it, and neither yields results without trust and human relationships. When data lives in silos and systems do not talk to each other, information that took years to generate goes to waste. Craig Dunningham, digital engineering lead at Arcadis, the global engineering and consultancy firm, put it plainly. “At the moment, we don’t really capitalize on what information is available,” he said. “By being able to connect that data, there’s a lot of

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Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman On Why Resilient Infrastructure Starts With Showing Up

In central Kentucky, the farming town of Burgin has a four-way stop and not much else. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows each other, where families help their neighbors solve whatever problems come their way. It’s also where Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman grew up on a farm and where her family ran a small business for five generations. Before she entered politics, Coleman learned about community issues at the local diner and from her students while teaching high school civics and coaching girls’ basketball in small towns across the commonwealth. Some of these schools were in areas where a washed-out bridge could mean kids couldn’t get to class, and a broadband dead zone meant they couldn’t log on from home. She can still see an infrastructure challenge through the eyes of a teacher scanning her classroom, counting who showed up and who couldn’t. Now in her second term as Kentucky’s lieutenant governor, Coleman has become one of the state’s most visible champions for building infrastructure that doesn’t just patch what broke but anticipates what’s coming. She also talks about the need for more engineers. It’s a philosophy forged in some hard lessons. In July 2022, up to 16

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Meet The Software That Helps Keep Colombia’s Most Isolated Towns Connected to the World

In Colombia, geography can be destiny. Steep ridgelines, dense jungle, and narrow valleys carve parts of the South American country into isolated pockets of civilization where roads can’t always follow. In many communities, a town’s main street doubles as its airstrip, and rivers are the only highway. A person might spend three hours by boat and another three by mule just to reach the neighboring town. Two pilots from SATENA planning their flight route in a simulator. An airplane can make some of these trips feasible. But threading safe flight routes through remote parts of Colombia is complex, riddled with such obstacles as high mountains and unpredictable weather, says Alexander Reyes González, leader of Air Navigation Affairs at SATENA, Colombia’s state-owned domestic airline.  A safe flight route is a piece of invisible infrastructure, and that’s exactly where software from Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, comes in. Its MicroStation software is typically used for building digital models of roads, bridges, tunnels, and other infrastructure. But SATENA relies on it to design flight maps and procedures that not only meet regulatory safety requirements but open entirely new routes.   That, in turn, helps satisfy SATENA’s social mandate: to connect the most

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The Man Who Opens Everything

When you walk into Bentley Systems’ Dublin office on most weekdays, you’ll likely find Julien Moutte exactly where you expect him: at a desk, made from light wood, located in the middle of the open-plan floor. There’s no corner office, no closed door. Instead, he’s surrounded by a beehive of software developers, product  managers, and other colleagues building Bentley’s civil engineering software. The symbolism of the setup is intentional. As Bentley’s chief technology officer, Moutte believes in removing barriers—and in leadership that’s accessible and visible. He typically arrives before 8 a.m. and is often the last to leave. His long hours aren’t meant to signal authority; he wants to be present and available. “At any point in time, people can see that I am here, I am working, doing everything I can to make us and our customers win,” he says. “Doing this hidden in a room ruins most of the benefit.” His desk serves as an invitation, and colleagues often stop by with questions or to kick around ideas about artificial intelligence (AI), infrastructure engineering, and other topics. “I want people to be able to engage me, ask questions, debate,” he says. “No hidden agenda; I want to create clarity about where

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How Dublin Is Building a Smarter and More Resilient City With Data and Digital Twins

On a brisk November morning, Julien Moutte walked through Dublin Docklands with a small camera crew in tow for a film being produced for Bentley Systems by BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions. Over the last two decades, the area has been transformed into a major tech hub in Ireland, and Moutte was telling a story about how cities can use data, digital models, and artificial intelligence (AI) to become smarter and more resilient. “Technology and infrastructure can have a massive impact on the world, but you always do that for the benefit of the citizens,” Moutte said. Moutte, who serves as Bentley’s chief technology officer, is one of the central voices in the new film, which is part of a digital content series presented by the International Project Finance Association (IPFA), a global organization focused on the future of urban infrastructure. Bentley’s film explores how Dublin is using digital technology to confront challenges familiar to cities around the world: flooding, fire risk, congestion, climate pressures, and data overload. What sets the Irish capital apart is its approach, and Smart Dublin is at the center of the effort. It’s an initiative created by the city’s four local authorities to bring together civic leaders, citizens, universities, startups, and

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Alabama Bets on AI to Fix Its Roads. It’s Not the Only State Placing That Wager

Good data means money well spent for Morgan Musick, an engineer at the Alabama Department of Transportation. High on her wish list is reliable, up-to-date information about the condition of every guardrail, road sign, and median strip marking Alabama’s 11,000 miles (about 17,703 km) of state roads and highways. The data needs to be so good that she can stake her department’s budget on it. Alabama is among the first U.S. states to adopt performance-based budgeting for road maintenance. The approach allocates money based on what the roads actually need, rather than on what each district requested the previous year. But the execution has been far from straightforward. The approach depends on good data, and for most of the past 15 years, that data came from crews driving the network of roadways with clipboards, cameras, and practiced eyes.   The results were valuable but uneven. Different inspectors saw different things.  Coverage varied as some stretches of road got surveyed more often than others. “To strengthen our performance-based budgeting, we need consistent, quantified data to produce condition assessments across all districts,” said Musick, the department’s assistant maintenance management engineer. The solution Alabama chose is Blyncsy, a platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) from

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How a Portuguese Water Utility Uses Software To Manage Its Network During Persistent Heat Waves

As summer temperatures in northern Portugal increasingly push past 38°C (100°F), water providers can’t afford to treat heat waves and demand spikes as outliers. When water tanks run low, pumping costs surge and pressure drops threaten service to major cities and remote rural towns alike.  The stakes are especially high for Águas do Norte, a public water and wastewater utility serving nearly 2 million residents across 63 diverse Portuguese municipalities. It needs a system that can show what’s happening across thousands of kilometers of its water pipe network and help decide what to do next. That’s why the utility has increasingly turned to Bentley Systems software. In fact, Bentley’s OpenFlows Water solution has become central to how Águas do Norte plans, anticipates stress on its system, and makes smarter investment decisions. It’s also part of a broader collaboration with H2OPT—a Portuguese engineering firm specializing in real-time hydraulic modeling—to modernize northern Portugal’s water infrastructure and boost resilience in the face of climate and population change.   “We needed a model of the entire system, something we could use for smarter, faster and more reliable decision-making,” says Luís Nicolau, director of the utility’s Asset and Investment Management.   A Utility with a broad mission- and a complex network Águas do Norte has a complex and challenging mandate. “We handle everything: drinking water, treatment, transmission to our municipal clients; and in eight communities, the

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Why an Open Standard for Gaussian Splats Could Transform Infrastructure

In early February, the Khronos Group, the open standards consortium which counts Google, Nvidia and Apple among its members, released a candidate for a new extension that could reshape how the world captures and shares three-dimensional reality. The extension, called KHR_gaussian_splatting, would for the first time enable storing 3D Gaussian splats inside glTF 2.0—the most widely used format for delivering 3D content across the internet. If that sounds technical, here’s what it means in plain language: there is now a path toward a universal, open format for a breakthrough 3D imaging technology that is poised to change how we experience the real world online. This format has the potential to dramatically improve everything from how engineers design, build and inspect bridges, factories and telecom networks, to how we experience sports, entertainment and everyday reality. The extension standardizes Gaussian splatting, a technique that turns ordinary photographs into stunningly realistic 3D scenes. Traditional models turn 2D images into 3D models by wrapping a hollow polygonal “skin” around objects. “KHR_Gaussian_splatting marks a major milestone for glTF, extending the format to support an entirely new class of geometric representation,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. The acronym glTF stands for graphics language

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This Software Can Predict Exactly Where the Power Grid Will Fail—So Operators Can Prevent It

You could argue that reliable electricity has never mattered more. Data centers powering AI are multiplying. Electric vehicles are spreading. Yet the grid carrying all this load was largely built decades ago, and it keeps failing under weather that old standards say it should survive.  In late January, ice storms across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee left hundreds of thousands of people and businesses without power. In Mississippi alone, the storm downed some 1.5 million feet of  wires—that’s more than 280 miles—damaged nearly 1,400 poles, 320 transformers and 800 transmission tower cross arms, according to Entergy. The pattern of destruction and recovery is familiar: ice accumulates, wind blows, poles and wires snap, crews replace them—often with the same size poles and components that just failed.  But the technology to break this cycle already exists. Advanced software can model every pole, crossarm, and wire on the grid, simulate any windstorm and ice cover, and show exactly which structures will fail. Add AI and connected data to the mix, including massive amounts of information captured by drones, and the bottleneck—modeling what’s already out there—is finally starting to crack.  Entrepreneur Otto Lynch is the expert on this topic. He has spent two decades on

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