Post by Bentley Systems

A century ago, the record-breaking Quebec Bridge took 17 years and three attempts to build. Today, recreating its geometry took an AI agent and one engineer just a few days. 🌁 It started as a dare. At a conference this spring, a fellow attendee asked Bentley senior product manager Louis-Martin Losier how far AI design tools could really go. Could they handle something truly complex? Losier picked the Quebec Bridge. The bridge has the longest cantilever span on Earth and it's sometimes called the 8th Wonder of the World. It's also right in his backyard. 🦾 Using MCP, an open standard that lets AI assistants operate other software, an AI agent worked directly inside Bentley's MicroStation software, turning plain-language instructions, historical drawings, and photographs into an accurate, georeferenced 3D model. Then Losier went further. Collaborating with his colleagues Christos Aloupis, Joshua Taylor and others, he connected the agent to Bentley STAAD structural analysis software to check the design and explain its reasoning. 🪄 The lesson wasn't that AI is magic. Early attempts confused the bridge with its neighbor and invented truss patterns. Success came when Losier gave the agent what every good engineering project needs: a detailed plan, locked constraints, and human review at every step. "This is not about replacing engineers," he says. "It's about automating repetitive tasks so they can spend more time on engineering, innovation, and problem solving." 👷🏽 The final call always belongs to the engineer. AI just gets them there faster. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/ddGu7Ztn Greg Demchak Julien Moutte Karl-Alexandre Jahjah Francois Valois Louis Nadeau Robin Louvet #AI #Engineering #Infrastructure #MicroStation #MCP #DigitalTwins #CivilEngineering #StructuralEngineering #MCP #STAAD #MicroStation #EngineeringInnovation #DigitalTwin #QuebecBridge

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