As Bentley Systems unveiled new infrastructure AI capabilities at its Year in Infrastructure conference this week, Francois Valois, senior vice president for open applications at Bentley, spoke to Infrastructure Global about the company’s plans.
Bentley has a vision for “trustworthy AI to shape the future of infrastructure”. Announcing its new Infrastructure AI co-innovation initiative, the infrastructure engineering software company is inviting engineering firms and asset owners to collaborate on the next generation of AI workflows.
The initiative has backing from the top of the organisation. “AI is poised to transform infrastructure,” said Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins. “At Bentley, our vision is for AI to empower infrastructure engineers, not replace them. Trustworthy AI, built on infrastructure context, can improve engineering productivity and transform workflows across project and asset lifecycles.”
Bentley’s senior vice president for open applications Francois Valois, an enthusiastic advocate for AI, says the technology is having an increasing impact on infrastructure projects. “This year, about one third of the entries in our Going Digital Awards were referring to AI. We are seeing customers leveraging some of our tools that were not geared for AI initially, that were then used to help essentially ground some of their own AI purpose. And what it does, it’s allowing you to calculate super, super quickly, something that would take hours to do,” he said.
Valois said that Bentley welcomed its customers taking the initiative in this way. “Absolutely, we welcome this because we think one of the strengths of Bentley is to have all these numerical engines that allow to provide really accurate answers and that could be used to help train AI. That’s why we have announced our Infrastructure AI initiative and we want to welcome as many of our accounts, or even new accounts, that would want to come with us and co-create,” he said.
Valois sees the increasing use of AI influencing industry business models going forward as companies get to grips with a much more open way of working that is less limited by some of the industry’s traditional rules and approaches. The company is fostering an opening collaborative approach to the integration of its products with AI, while recognising the limits of an industry where reliability and trust are key. “In our spirit of being open, the whole interpretability piece in this context is key, so we think it is very important that we open up and not close out,” Valois said.
This more flexible approach has seen some Bentley products used on a daily basis, with customers charged a nominal fee for using it on that daily basis. The company is also moving to a quarterly subscription for some products and bringing in the idea of having a fair use policy. “We just want to be fair to users and we want to be open because, as our CEO said, this is reflecting what’s happening in the industry,” said Valois. “The industry itself is also questioning. If you’re an engineering firm and you charge hourly and then you could do something ten times faster, but you provide the same output, you need to be able to do it differently,” he said.
The flexible, more open approach is clearly going to change the way the industry works in the future. Valois agrees. “Exactly how things will go, I don’t really know, but there’s several scenarios where things can go. I’m not speculating on that, but what I’m telling you is that everybody is looking at that sort of change in the industry. But also, we’ve got to think about the sort of gain in productivity that we get. AI is just a tool, right? It’s not replacing engineers, it’s adding capabilities. We live in a human-machine system anyways, no matter what we do. And so, I use my computer, I use my phone, I use my car, so they’re all machines. And now, AI is basically changing that mix a little bit,” said Valois.
In an industry where there are not enough people to meet the demands that society is making on it for more infrastructure to be delivered faster, AI is being seen as one answer in helping to plug the talent and skills gap across the sector. This is a concept that Bentley is keen to push more widely, as it sees a key part of its role as being “a responsible citizen of the world”.
With the pace of digital change in the industry speeding up like never before and with parts of the sector still maybe a little slow on the uptake, how does Valois think things are going to shape up by the end of this decade?
“The industry itself is an industry that is careful in leveraging technology for the right reasons. And this is what we are also telling the market. The key thing to remember is that we’re not using AI where AI doesn’t belong. AI offers a lot more abilities to consider more design scenarios quicker by means of being able to explore the possibilities much faster. So, we’re using AI for the good things. Going forward, in the work environment, either you are augmented with AI, or you are not. And I know in what camp I want to be.”
Click here to find out more about Bentley’s Infrastructure AI initiative.
