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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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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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