I recently had an opportunity to sit down and have a (virtual) conversation with CEO Greg Bentley about his vision for the future of technology in construction—more specifically the digital twin—and Bentley Systems’ objective in the past year of helping make the digital twin accessible to everyone. We talked about it all—the move to digital twin, the need for a tech-savvy workforce, and even working from home. Here are my big three takeaways from my conversation.

Bring Physical and Digital Together

Bentley was quick to share with me his thoughts on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s vision for fusing computing into physical processes. Bentley says, “If we all become less tethered to the physical so we can apply ourselves more virtually, and have a greater scope of what we can do as a result, then we really will have learned.”

At Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure Conference in October, the two companies discussed the new infrastructure digital twin alliance priorities. The alliance will combine Microsoft’s Azure IoT Digital Twins and Azure Maps with Bentley Systems’ iTwins platform, enabling engineers, architects, constructors, and city planners to work within a comprehensive city-scale digital twin, empowering better decision-making, optimizing operational efficiency, reducing costs, and improving collaboration.

“We are trying to make (the digital twin) something everyone can imagine and benefit from,” Bentley says.

One example comes from the capital city of Dublin, Ireland, with a population of more than 1.2 million, which is developing a large-scale digital twin as part of the city’s planning efforts. Working with Microsoft and Bentley, it is reimaging how interactive virtual environments and digital twins can support citizens and set the standard for future planning in cities.

“We had in mind that certain things would get better through cloud services and digital twins, but we wouldn’t have a fraction of the ideas that our attendees here at a Year in Infrastructure I think will have when they (think about it),” he adds.

Similarly, FC Barcelona, one of the oldest football clubs in Europe, is partnering with Bentley as part of the club’s renovation of Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium, currently under construction amid the pandemic. The project will upgrade streets in the neighborhood and increase capacity at the stadium to revitalize an aging stadium and for the club to compete with other top European cities.

The Move to Remote Work

Another big trend to watch: Bentley’s ProjectWise, in conjunction with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Teams, has empowered Bentley’s users to work from home safely while collaborating virtually on projects anywhere in the world—a movement that quite honestly doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

“Practically everyone is struck by some idea of what they can do and contribute without having to go on site necessarily,” says Bentley. “They can now work on any project anywhere in the world. They can work and collaborate with anyone in the world.”

This notion has changed the game for how we collaborate and connect with our construction projects, but Bentley tells me it is bigger than just thinking about “working from home.” Rather, it has changed the way we view our relationship with technology.

“It is not limited to working from home. It is this notion of computing can bring the physical to you and you can bring your expertise—if you are in construction or engineering—to assets anywhere and help anywhere.”

FutureOn is a case in point: The fast-growing Norwegian software company works with an expanding portfolio of global energy companies, and recently secured an investment from the Bentley Acceleration Fund and established a strategic partnership with U.S.-based Bentley Systems to accelerate the digitalization of the oil and gas industry.

FutureOn emerged from the 3D visualization agency Xvision with more than 20 years of visual engineering experience specifically in the oil and gas subsea domain. Most recently, the company has launched the cloud-based data platform FieldTwin, which offers centralized API (application programming interface) integrations to many of the leading engineering simulation and data analysis tools. When combined with FieldTwin, FieldAP enables cross-discipline remote collaboration for design and development of subsea digital twins.

FutureOn and Bentley Systems will combine FutureOn’s field design application and its API-centric collaboration platform with Bentley’s iTwin platform to provide customers a next-generation digital twin solution capable of driving design methodologies in upstream project development for the next decade.

The Future Big Thinkers

All of this will require a new set of workers—ones that can easily tap into the data and the analytics to build our cities of the future.

Bentley says it so eloquently: “The engineers of today are not going to employ the data scientists of the future; they are going to be the analytics professionals of the future themselves. They are going to be applying machine learning.” He says we need people who are comfortable working in 3D.

The digital twin is essential for industrializing—which is apparent in many examples out of China. What will emerge in the future are uses cases for the technology that surpass even our own imaginations today. “The use cases are still beyond what I imagine, but I think there are going to be more use cases once there is data that can be queried,” says Bentley.

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