Peggy continues her five-part series of predictions for 2027 by looking at how AI will move from experimentation to real-world scale in manufacturing. For her second prediction, Peggy says 2027 could be a turning point as manufacturers move beyond pilots and proof of concepts and begin making AI a more integral part of how their operations run.
She also encourages listeners to:
· Focus on business problems where AI can create measurable value, rather than adding AI everywhere.
· Fix processes, connect data, and involve people before trying to scale AI.
· Use AI to augment the knowledge and experience of workers while scaling the use cases that actually work.
Does the future of infrastructure engineering need to be open? Peggy Smedley sits down with Greg Demchak, vice president of emerging technologies at Bentley Systems, to unpack why open standards, open-source technology, and APIs (application programming interfaces) are essential for the next generation of infrastructure. He says openness is about agreeing to a standard that enables interoperability between systems.
They also discuss:
· What open really means in an infrastructure context.
· The hidden cost of vendor lock-in and why data portability matters across an asset’s lifecycle.
· How Bentley’s iTwin platform and iModel open schema enable a vendor-neutral, single source of truth.
· The role of AI agents and MCP (model context protocol) in the future of infrastructure engineering.
· Bentley Labs experiments with agentic software development.
· Why governance and cybersecurity are essential with critical infrastructure.
· The next frontier for generative AI and infrastructure.
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