Though the annual Year in Infrastructure Conference hosted by Bentley Systems was forced to “go digital” itself this year due to the world events, it still offered some surprising insights on the technologies that are defining the AEC and Geospatial industries. In this dual interview, Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems and Keith Bentley, CTO, talk about the impacts of 2020 – both positive and negative – on technology adoption, the potential for major advances in technology just around the corner, and a philosophy of partnership that drives what they do.
“I thought 2020 was going to be a pivotal year, even last year – I remember saying the technology is, past the good idea stage. It is really at the, ‘you know how to make it work best and how to deploy it’ stage.
One thing I’ll point out about 2020, is that the intimidation factor, has been lowered, because people say, ‘Hey, I have to do something different – I can’t do it the way I am, I can’t even go to my own office.’ So we’ve managed to get people to recognize that they can create a digital twin just from pictures or by flying a drone. It is not that you have a committee… you’re able to say, ”let’s just do it.'”
Keith Bentley
“[In the future] engineering firms ought to be not in the business of selling their hours, when automation is coming fast. Engineering should consist of doing these machine learning applications that we want to enable with our itwins platform.”
Greg Bentley
