What are the key takeaways from  2025 Bentley Civil User Conference?

• 3 December 2025
• Construction Focus
• 1060 Views

After a seven-year hiatus, the Bentley Civil User Conference returned as an in-person event, bringing together over 500 Bentley users, experts, and industry leaders to tackle persistent sector challenges like workforce shortages and aging infrastructure. The central theme of the 2025 conference was how digital project delivery, open applications, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are poised to revolutionize civil engineering.

The conference cemented three major technological trends as essential for the future of infrastructure.

First of all, the conference discusses how digital twins revolutionize project delivery. Bentley solutions, including iTwin and Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, are empowering engineers to transform complex data into actionable insights across the entire project lifecycle.

Industry leaders highlighted the massive downstream cost savings and reduction in rework achieved through implementing digital project delivery and creating a single digital model.

Another key focus of the conference is the leverage of open standards & geospatial interoperability. Bentley reinforced its commitment to open standards through the integration of Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Google Maps into MicroStation 2025. This integration provides engineers with rich 2D and 3D geospatial context for environmental and risk assessments, significantly improving real-world design accuracy.

Last but not least, another key trend is the AI-supported workflow. Amid sector-wide workforce shortages, Bentley is positioning AI as a critical tool to accelerate engineering work, not replace it.

Solutions like OpenSite+ and generative AI for infrastructure promise to significantly boost efficiency, allowing professionals to address the massive backlog of work and close the gap caused by staff shortages.

The overwhelming message from the 2025 conference is clear: the future of infrastructure hinges on the purposeful adoption of digital transformation. The tools—from digital twins to open data ecosystems and AI-powered design—are now available.

The challenge, according to conference organizers, is no longer about keeping pace but setting the pace. Senior leaders are now tasked with championing these innovations and empowering their teams to adopt these technologies to drive meaningful change and deliver resilient infrastructure.

• iTwin
• AI
• Bentley Systems
• OpenSite+
• Open Data
• Google 3D tiles
• Infrastructure cloud