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

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.

Kyle Rosenmeyer, Design Leader, VHB; Scott McMaster, BIM Manager for Digital Delivery, PennDOT; and Kevin O’Connor, VP Digital Delivery, Parsons; Ian Rosam, Director of Product Management, Bentley; Bibhuti Aryal, Director of Industry Solutions, Bentley

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.

An example of Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles within MicroStation
A land development project using OpenSite+
- Video Advertisement -

Related Post

China Uses Digital Twin  to Build First Large-scale Power Station in Karst Geology

Shanghai Investigation, Design & Research Institute Co., Ltd. (SIDRI) has used Bentley’s digital engineering and digital twin technologies to overcome complex geological challenges at the Caiziba Pumped-Storage Power Station in Fengjie County, Chongqing, China. The project is the first large-scale pumped-storage power station built in an area with complex karst geology, where caves, fissures, underground […]

Viscan Transforms B29 Highway Project With Digital Twin Technology

Viscan GmbH has transformed its reality capture workflow for the B29 highway expansion in Baden-Württemberg, turning an initially unreliable digital process into a high-performance digital twin system for one of Germany’s first fully digital construction sites. The B29 project includes nine new structures, bridges, and retaining walls. Viscan’s role was to provide construction teams and […]

AI Could Predict Infrastructure Failures Weeks in Advance

AI-powered analytics are helping infrastructure engineers move from reacting to failures toward predicting problems before they become emergencies, according to Vahid Abdollahi, an Applied AI Scientist at Bentley Systems. Traditional monitoring often alerts operators only after a measurement crosses a fixed threshold. AI, however, can analyze data from multiple sensors to identify unusual patterns and […]

Bentley iTwin Capture Helps Transform City-Scale Digital Twin Development Across India

Almondz Global Infra-consultants Limited is helping transform city-scale digital twin development across India through the Government of Gujarat’s Project NAKSHA. Using Bentley’s iTwin Capture, the company created highly accurate digital twins by processing more than 100 terabytes of drone, LiDAR, and geospatial data, including over 500,000 images. The project supports smarter urban planning, disaster management, […]

Bentley Systems Expands Carbon Analysis Tools for Infrastructure Projects

Bentley Systems is highlighting its carbon analysis software as a tool to help infrastructure organizations reduce emissions, improve project efficiency, and comply with increasingly strict environmental regulations. The software, available through Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, is designed to help engineers and project teams assess the carbon impact of infrastructure projects from the earliest stages of planning […]

Bentley Systems Highlights AI-Powered Digital Twins to Improve Infrastructure Data Management

At the Cesium Developer Conference, Bentley Systems showcased how its Cesium platform, iTwin technology, and new AI tools can help solve a major infrastructure challenge: keeping project data connected throughout an asset’s entire lifecycle. Industry experts noted that valuable information created during design is often lost when projects move from planning to construction and maintenance. […]