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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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Inside Bentley’s Tech Summit: Breaking Barriers to Build Value

On the second morning of the Bentley Tech Summit in Berlin, Marina Savenkova looked around a crowded conference room and paused. “I totally can say one Bentley,” said Savenkova, an Ireland-based senior application engineer at Bentley Systems. “Yeah, one Bentley with colleagues and with users.” It wasn’t a slogan. It was an observation. All around her were engineers, product managers, solution specialists, and Bentley software users from across the world, clustered together in small groups. Laptops open, diagrams sketched, notes scribbled. Workflows adjusted on the fly. Problems that normally move slowly through organizational channels were quickly being discussed—and often resolved—in real time. The scene captured the essence of the summit, also known as BTS25. The three-day event wasn’t designed as a product showcase or series of presentations, but rather as a working environment—one where learning, teaching, and alignment happened together across roles and disciplines. “It’s almost like lightning in a bottle,” said Volaree Rendon, Bentley’s director of solutions engineering. “You have this hive mind.” That collaborative atmosphere was intentional. More than 500 Bentley colleagues and users came to Berlin in December to do the hard work of understanding how infrastructure is designed, built, and operated today—and where friction still exists.

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Bentley Systems Brings AI and Digital Twins to The World’s Largest Transportation Research and Policy Forum

Each January, Washington becomes the global hub for the future of transportation. Thousands of policymakers, researchers, engineers, and industry leaders gather in the U.S. capital for the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). The gathering is widely regarded as the world’s largest transportation research and policy forum. The reason: influence. As part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, TRB works year-round with more than 5,500 transportation professionals through its research programs and technical committees. That work informs transportation policy, funding, and regulation, including across the U.S. at the federal and state levels.This year, the annual meeting attracts 12,000 attendees and features nearly 250 sessions that bridge artificial intelligence (AI) data with information technology, geotechnical engineering, maintenance, energy, mobility, and other areas. For Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, the TRB Annual Meeting is where technology, research, policy, and real-world impact intersect. “There is a magic to TRB, the only global conference that brings together all key stakeholders to define the future of a multi-modal, complex transportation system,” says Ben Levine, Bentley’s director of market development who previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for research & technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation. “This

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How Hawai‘i Is Modernizing Road Maintenance With AI: Inside The AI Effort Helping Hawai‘i Stay on the Move

Hawai‘i is so rich in natural beauty that in parts of the world its name is shorthand for paradise. But exploring that paradise depends on something far more prosaic: roads. Maintaining them is anything but easy. Sun, salty air, torrential rain, lush vegetation, and even volcanic activity take a relentless toll on roads and highways that encircle and cross the U.S. state’s islands. That challenge is why the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation (HDOT), working with the University of Hawai‘i, launched Eyes on the Road. The program uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze imagery from 1,000 high-definition dashcams. The free cameras were handed out to residents for installation in their cars to help spot road problems early—before they become safety hazards. “The Eyes on the Road program will give us the information we need to get to damaged facilities quickly,” HDOT Director Ed Sniffen says. HDOT and Bentley recently announced their collaboration. The dashcams automatically record video as residents go about their day, capturing road safety issues such as guardrail damage, vegetation encroachment, and road debris. The system uploads the video to the cloud via a cellular connection and anonymizes the data. Using machine learning algorithms and advanced

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What Our Latest Acquisitions Mean for Infrastructure Analytics

Often called the world’s largest machine, the power grid is an engineering marvel that helped supercharge modernity and bring electricity to homes and businesses. Cellular networks come close to the grid in size and importance. They revolutionized communications, banking, transportation, and other critical industries. Both systems now serve as the foundation for the era of artificial intelligence (AI), with one feeding electricity to hyperscale data centers and the other ferrying information and insights. Though largely out of mind, these critical networks and their transmission and cell towers are never entirely out of sight. They dot urban and rural landscapes, including river crossings and steep mountain sides, and keeping them in good shape can be an arduous manual task. Bentley Systems is the leader in infrastructure engineering software, and over the last decade, our Asset Analytics business has been simplifying asset maintenance and operation. We’ve been collecting high-resolution images from drones and other sources that can see features as small as 1 millimeter and using the data to build digital twins, or virtual replicas, of cell and transmission towers. We then use AI and machine learning (ML) to analyze the data and automate cell tower inspections, improve maintenance, catalogue the equipment

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Best of 2025: 6 Stories that Showcase How Digital Twins and AI are Transforming Infrastructure

Protecting sub-sea level New Orleans from flooding. Building atop the shifting, salt-rich soil in Saudi Arabia. Reviving gold mines mothballed decades ago. These are just some of the challenges that engineers are successfully taking on around the world with help from Bentley Systems software. Learn more in the stories below about how engineers are integrating digital twins, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technology to solve major infrastructure challenges and build for the future. A Digital Gold Rush Record gold prices have flipped the script on the economics of mining, which means mines that were closed decades ago are suddenly gleaming again with promise. But reviving a mine isn’t as simple as turning the lights back on. Companies need to know how much gold is left, where to find it, and how much it will cost to get it out. They also need to determine the mine’s impact on the environment—which is where Seequent, Bentley’s subsurface company, and its industry-leading software come in. Mining teams are turning to Seequent’s Evo, a cloud platform that connects data, teams, and tools in a single collaborative environment. Evo’s accurate modeling isn’t just good for the bottom line—it’s essential for sustainability. “If you can move

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World Tour: 5 Great 3D Visualizations from Cesium in 2025

On Christmas Eve, excited children—and the merely curious—can track Santa Claus’ sleigh across the skies thanks to NORAD’s famous Santa tracker. It’s one of the best-known public-facing applications of Cesium, Bentley Systems’ geospatial technology, which can stream massive datasets, render them in 3D, and deliver them to anyone, anywhere, on any device. In 2025, Santa’s journey caps a year of great Cesium 3D visualizations from around the world, including immersive tours of Berlin, Barcelona, the Netherlands, and Belém, Brazil, this year’s host city for the UN Climate Change Conference. Cesium is also helping a professor in Japan to create interactive records of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Keep reading to learn more about the projects—and to experience for yourself how Cesium lets you experience history, explore landmarks, and marvel at ingenious infrastructure old and new. Using 3D Tech to Redefine How We Experience History University of Tokyo professor Hidenori Watanave has spent two decades creating interactive, explorable records of global conflicts, including the World War II atomic bombings of Japan. With a few clicks, you can walk through Hiroshima and see images of the city as it was. You can also watch video accounts of the bombing directly from

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