The AEC industry is at a fascinating inflection point. Gone are the days of the sector being a technological laggard, averse to moving away from the analog world toward the digital one. Today, the industry is dealing with growing demand across nearly all project types, and especially with infrastructure, while simultaneously trying to work around workforce challenges throughout the industry. Even with this change in mindset, though, the industry is still plagued with missed deadlines and budget overruns, at least some of which can be streamlined with more or better digital adoption.
This was the subject of a recent report commissioned by Revizto, a BIM collaboration platform with customers around the world. The report, entitled Bridging the Gap: The 2025 Digital Design and Construction Report, featured insights coming from a survey of over 2,000 industry professionals earlier this year in the second half of March. Most of the respondents – over 80 percent, according to the report – are in leadership roles, with three-quarters coming from firms with revenues over $100 million.
In an interview with Geo Week News, Revizto founder and CEO Arman Gukasyan shared that the company firmly believes that transformation within this industry is going to take a village, so to speak, and that no one organization is going to be able to do it alone. That, combined with the need to drive this change in philosophy as quickly as possible, motivated them to commission this survey for their own “sanity check” and make it public for the entire industry to see.
“I do deeply believe that there is no one player in this market that can change it,” he said. “I truly believe that we have to do everything we can in our power to make this digital change within this industry as well as possible, as quickly as possible. So the big reason [to make this survey public] is to help make the changes in the industry faster and better.”
From Gukasyan’s perspective, one of the most important insights from this report is just how much of the growing demand is coming from infrastructure projects. To wit, 41 percent of respondents in the survey indicated that this was the area in which they are seeing the greatest demand for design and build services, ahead of commercial office space (31 percent), transport (30 percent), and civic centers (28 percent). Infrastructure was the leading response across the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, and Germany.
What’s so important about this development is when it’s paired with the next page of the report, dealing with budget changes compared to the original estimate. Nearly half of all respondents (45 percent) indicated their projects typically see an increase of between 11 and 20 percent over the original estimate, and bigger firms trended even higher. At the top of the scale, 20 percent of companies with over $1 billion projects reported budget changes between 21 and 30 percent.
Gukasyan hopes that this report can shed some light on these problems that are present throughout the world, as they have an effect not only on the industry itself but the communities in which they work. Most of these infrastructure projects are at least partially funded with public money, so these instances of going over budget hit the taxpayers’ pockets first and foremost. In fact, half of the respondents overall indicated that between a quarter and a half of their projects are at least partially funded by public money, with that number skewing higher in places like the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
“[We hope that this report] will give them, hopefully, a good understanding of what’s going on and make some right decisions within their organizations to push this digitalization a bit more, because it influences all of us, you, me, on taxpayers. It’s our money that’s wasted,” Gukasyan said.
That brings us to some of the challenges that are still coming up in the industry, with the biggest one still being time. When asked what, if anything, is the biggest barrier to adopting new technology for their firms, 30 percent of respondents indicated that time is the biggest barrier, beating out lack of policy/mandate (25 percent), people (22 percent), and even cost (21 percent). It makes sense, as that lack of skilled talent combined with growing demand means there’s only so much time in the day for all of this work, and that often means training and onboarding are left to the side.
Revizto, Gukasyan says, is designed with that barrier in mind to make things as seamless as possible, and this problem being reflected in the survey backs up what they know is a big challenge for the sector. He tells Geo Week News that they are building an academy for training that is free for their users, which should shorten the time they need to train staff.
“We are rethinking the way people can quickly get started with Revizto,” he told Geo Week News. “If you look at the stats we have, within an hour, you can get started. And then basically after one month of working with Revizto, you know everything you need to know to be successful.”
Beyond the issue of time, the other major issue that is top of mind for firms around the world is how collaboration takes place across their organization. On the one hand, 36 percent of respondents said that collaboration tools are the tools in their software stack on which they rely the most, the top response on that question. However, that doesn’t mean the collaboration problem has been solved. In the section alluded to above in which organizations indicated how often they go over budget or have to rework, poor communication and coordination was one of the most cited reasons for that rework.
This is not a new problem in the industry, and one of the big reasons for this push toward digitalization has been to improve collaboration. According to Gukasyan, it’s a system issue that is preventing the collaboration problem from being solved.
“It’s a mindset, honestly,” he said when asked why collaboration and communication continue to be cited as a major issue for the industry. “Do you have a mindset to do it right, or do you just want a quick win?”
This report also showcased that, for as far as the industry has come, there is still a long way to go. Right now, it might seem that all of these different solutions for visualization, analysis, and collaboration might serve as competition to each other, but that’s not exactly as Gukasyan sees it. As mentioned above, he’s a strong believer that no solution will solve every issue, and that it takes different solutions integrating for a strong workflow. Instead, his biggest competition lies elsewhere.
“[As the report shows], 27 percent of teams are still collaborating on Excel and via email. That blows my mind,” Gukasyan said. “That’s what I say all the time: Believe it or not, our main competitor is not other technologies. It’s email, and it’s Excel.”
The entire report is available today through Revizto’s website, and in addition to the insights shared here and more from the survey, it also showcases a handful of case studies showcasing how industry leaders are leveraging their digital workflows to streamline their projects and eliminate much of the inefficiency plaguing the sector.
