Ichi Features

Ichi analyzes typical architectural drawing sets, specifications, and construction documents to catch missing information, scope gaps, cross-sheet and cross-document discrepancies, and internal conflicts. The aim is for architects to use tools like Ichi—which benefits from AI models—to find all such issues before they are eventually discovered in the field at the construction site, where their cost impact can be detrimental to project success.

Architects are already using AI tools, including Bluebeam’s new Bluebeam Max suite, to analyze and pore over architects’ drawings to identify discrepancies, scope gaps, and missing information. Clients that feature paid consultants functioning as construction managers (CMs), a type of watchdog role in the construction industry, are especially interested in such new AI tools because this kind of tool is precisely what they have never had at their disposal.

Ichi is a leading new AI-QA/QC and CA tool for the AEC industry.

Ichi therefore helps architects discover issues before documents are released to clients and their consultants, forming a tighter set of documentation and a more highly resolved technical design.

Ichi uses AI to analyze drawing sets against a massive library of ICC-licensed building codes (including IBC, IECC, and ADA) along with local regional amendments. Ichi says its AI models are not like generic AI models (eg: ChatGPT) but instead operate collaboratively within a “walled garden” workspace. Using AI tools to rapidly check for code compliance was the hot new focus at AIA26 this year, as we have noted several times on Architosh. However, AI isn’t just great at code and zoning.

The CA Phase

Ichi also speeds up the construction administration phase. And it can capture and distribute firm knowledge from these interactions so staff architects gain future insights and benefits in the next or current projects. And Ichie isn’t just built for architects or engineers, but also for jurisdictions and professional reviewers.

But back to CA. Ichi analyzes submittals, RFIs, and construction documents and surfaces the information at scale to determine that things are conforming, identify what is missing, and highlight what needs attention.

Ichi can also pull submittals from Procore to work on. For RFI analysis, Ichi automates the context-gathering phase of addressing RFIs, including the history of responses to previous RFIs.

Ichi begins by having users upload all of their documents or link to these documents in Procore. Once complete, Ichi can run deep analyses of all documents—from construction drawing sets to specifications to project manuals and other industry or office standards.

Closing Comments

I like that all such AI QA/QC tools don’t remove the professional obligations of licensed architects and engineers. The tool accelerates those workflows via AI automation and helps professionals become not just faster but possibly more thorough. To learn more, visit them here.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

AI tools that operate on uploaded PDF documents are in a separate class from tools that perform QA/QC directly within design and documentation authoring systems, such as BIM programs and CAD tools. Within this different class of QA/QC tools, the possible selections are fewer. We have already written about Kestrel Labs and its award-winning (see: Architosh, “AIA26: Architosh 12th ‘BEST of SHOW’ honors for digital technologies at AIA San Diego,” 22 Jun 2026) plugin for Revit and future integration with Trimble solutions. We are also aware of VitruAI and its plugin for QA/QC and general compliance workflows in Revit, which we mentioned here (see: Architosh, “AIA26: Expo Show Floor Report 7—Layer, Arcol, Egnite, and more.” 13 Aug 2026). 

These two solutions function differently from Ichi and its kind. They do, or have the capacity to do, this QA/QC work directly within Revit. At the same time, one must acknowledge that not all AEC professionals use Revit. Thousands of firms and professionals work with competitor tools from Bentley, Trimble, and Nemetschek. Moreover, jurisdictions, consultants, CMs, and the like don’t know Revit and will prefer solutions that work with uploaded PDF drawing sets. So there is a need in the industry for both in-app hosted QA/QC solutions and external QA/QC solutions like Ichi. 

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More AI Software

ArchiBoost AI

ArchiBoost AI is another AI-powered QA/QC compliance software, but also a tool that functions as a knowledge hub for your firm. As their website says, “Every project depends on two types of intelligence: what your firm already knows — and what this project uniquely requires.”

ArchiBoost AI works to bind these two together, linking the first knowledge layer (Firm Intelligence) to the second layer (Project Intelligence). That first layer is about what you reuse, including BIM execution plans, documentation standards, QA/QC checklists, internal best practices, specifications, and master spec templates, etc.

The second layer is about what the project demands uniquely across standard data and documents.

As we noted in reports twice now, using AI software for scanning and reviewing plans and models was the hot big thing at AIA26 this year in San Diego. Suddenly, QA/QC (quality assurance and quality control) is all the rage. And while many new firms were showcasing such technology, other important leaders in this segment were not at AIA26, like VitruAI, which has truly ambitious plans for agentic AI in AEC.

ArchiBoost AI image showing its knowledge hub structure. A firm’s best details shouldn’t disappear into archival folders. ArchiBoost extracts metadata from a firm’s past projects and builds a living, searchable library that evolves with your firm.

There is an interesting differentiator between these new AI-powered QA/QC software systems. Some work with the PDF output only, while others work with the actual BIM models. In the case of Architosh AIA26 BEST of SHOW winner Kestrel Labs, their solution works inside of Revit via a plugin. It also works in a web browser as a general code compliance system to help architects understand requirements on a project before they even have BIM models. Kestral Labs’ system is designed for the duration of the project from inception to post-occupancy. And Kestrel Labs is aiming to work not just on Revit but also soon on SketchUp models. That part has us excited because we believe that is quite challenging to do.

MORE: AIA26: Kestrel Labs — Native BIM Compliance Platform

At the same time, VitruAI, like Kestrel Labs, works inside Revit as a plugin. But VitruAI is an agentic AI production system, not just a QA/QC platform. Their plans are grander and more ambitious. They are starting with codes, compliance regulations, office standards, and project requirements, but they have AI agents planned for much more within their VitruAI Labs, including AI agents for structural sizing, MEP routing, and a document-parsing AI agent. And their roadmap for agentic AI is even larger. Plus, they are looking at integrations between VitruAI and Solibri, SketchUp, Rhino and Grasshopper, and IFC. We bring this up about VitruAI to point out that developers are looking at the entire architectural process as being served by AI agents at every step, across more tools than just Revit.

Arcol

Arcol won the AIA Architosh BEST of SHOW award for the BIM category two years in a row this year. The well-funded BIM 2.0 industry darling has won over numerous top architecture firms and since last year added marquee US large construction firms to its client roster.

Arcol is showing its new integration of spreadsheets that can be bi-directionally synced with Excel files.

This momentum is driven by continuous innovative development, adding useful features to its easy-to-use UI and UX. The latest is the bidirectional bridge between Rhino 3D geometry and Arcol. As senior associate editor Architosh Pete Evans, AIA, remarks:

Arcol had already added Boards to its BIM 2.0 program in the summer of 2025, but recently they added sophisticated table linking so that Arcol model data can be linked into other table applications or worksheets such as those for pricing data.

Arcol firmly believes that agentic AI will power Arcol along with human architects in the near future.

While agentic AI is being plumbed into Arcol today, a distinguishing feature of Arcol is its Figma-style multiplayer engine that allows multiple architects, owners, builders, and others to click a link and enter the same model (file) and simultaneously edit geometry in real time without file locking, manual syncing, or lag. As you work, you can see your teammates’ cursors moving around the user interface. In the near future, instead of seeing your human teammates’ cursors in the UI, human architects will also see the cursors of AI agents working in the model as well. That is the vision of the future!

Egnyte

Egnyte is a leading platform for secure file sharing, content management, and governance. Unlike enterprise cloud storage offerings from Dropbox, Box, Microsoft and others, Egnyte is specifically tailored for industries with heavy data loads, complex file types, and strict compliance needs—such as AEC, life sciences, and legal.

Egnyte is a hybrid cloud architecture platform and virtual appliances that run on a local office server or a network-attached storage (NAS) computer and mirror the Egnyte cloud data. Dropbox and similar offerings, instead, are direct-to-cloud syncing platforms. Clients individually link to the cloud and sync directly to files whose masters are stored on the Dropbox cloud.

One powerful advantage of Egnyte is performance and data file protection. Since the appliance server syncs to the Egnyte cloud rather than to an architect’s own computer while sitting in the office, the architect can work swiftly, opening a 2 GB AutoCAD, Revit, or Archicad file and working at local gigabit network speeds (near instantaneous). Egnyte quietly syncs changes slowly in the background (the work happens between the Egnyte appliance and the cloud)

The other advantage is true file locking. Folks who use Dropbox and similar cloud services know that if two people try to open the same file at the same time, it is possible, and users only get soft warnings. But they can also get, in some cases, “conflicted copies,” which create a mess for IT and BIM managers, not to mention end users.

With Egnyte, you can use the platform as a cloud service, or you can deploy a NAS or appliance on your network in your offices (yes, offices as in plural). Egnyte can sync multiple appliances across offices worldwide. Having the hybrid architecture helps with large-file access and write speeds on local LANs within offices, particularly for very large files.

A newer feature in Egnyte is secure AI (artificial intelligence). You can turn files within an organization into “firm-wide knowledge” to power both collaboration and governance. Using Anthropic’s MCP technology, users working across a myriad of applications can use Egnyte’s AI chat box to ask questions about projects and teams, and the AI accesses data from email and other applications.

Egnyte AI MCP connectors today include Gmail, Jira, Confluence, Procore, Slack, and others, plus a growing library of other apps. The AI can draft responses, like for email, and then send the draft back to Gmail as a draft after you approve it. This essentially turns Egnyte into a central intelligence hub.

In addition to the performance and data security benefits, Egnyte has specific AEC-only features, including XREF and path preservation (for DWG/AutoCAD files), smart cache SMB collaboration for single-site Revit Co-Editing, and integrations with Autodesk Forma Cloud, Procore, and Bluebeam Studio.

Layer

In 2019, the innovative mobile-cloud-first application Layer won Architosh AIA BEST of SHOW in the Mobile + Cloud category. Since then, the application has continued to evolve. Layer was not shown in a booth at AIA that year but was a major feature in a large, well-attended educational session that Architosh attended.

Layer 4 is the current version of this innovative app that refers to itself as a “workflow platform for buildings.” Being mobile-cloud-first, Layer is very strong in the field capture of data and photos and the management of the same in the field on your mobile device.

Layer 4 is the latest version of this award-winning app for architects. The modern platform helps architects work smarter with data records, getting data away from inefficient spreadsheets and into Layer. Layer has a flexible UI/UX and can be configured in infinite ways. It is ideal for collecting survey data of existing buildings, FF&E management, field reports, Room Data Sheets, CMMS, and more.

For those of you old enough to recall the FileMaker Pro solutions built for the architecture industry back in the 1990s, Layer shares one common aspect with that legendary relationship database tool—the ability to easily customize the data fields in the UI/UX and the reports the application can spit out. On some level, Layer is the heir apparent to FileMaker Pro in AEC since that application and the company behind it (Apple, of all things) have largely turned their backs on AEC.

Layer 4 is designed to reduce your firm’s use of spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets. It’s not that spreadsheets are evil, but that spreadsheets are horrible to work with in the field on mobile devices. And they are also horrible to work with as a way to store data records of things like furniture, equipment, appliances, and all manner of objects that are placed in buildings.

These are just a sampling of the pre-build templates for managing this kind of data inside Layer 4.

Layer 4 works with Revit so you can link Revit to your Layer data fields. Layer has captured the attention of leading architecture firms, including POPULOUS, AECOM, DMA, Leo A Daly, SmithGroup, and others.

Bimbeats

BIMbeats is an analytics platform for architecture firms. The firm says, “We automate data collection and visualization so you can understand how your team really works, what’s helping, what’s slowing you down, and where to focus next.”

BIMbeats is software that helps practices right-size computing equipment and software. From this perspective alone, the software can more than pay for itself by helping to find performance bottlenecks and underutilization of powerful equipment.

What BIMbeats does is integrate with leading industry tools like Revit, AutoCAD, Bluebeam Revu, Tally, Rhino, Grasshopper, Adobe, Navis, Enscape, and many others. It gathers data about these tools and their utilization by staff, the sizes of files, and how the hardware in your firm is running these applications. From this data it can surface patterns and provide insight about them, like file size warnings on projects, in-place Revit Families, total sheets, views, etc.

BIMbeats showing the hardware monitoring charts in its interface.

Hardware monitoring is useful so firms can better plan for future hardware based on their equipment is actually used. This can help firms reduce over-spec’ing computer equipment when users actually don’t fully push such equipment to the max or are not using apps that require that level of power. It can also show the opposite and reveal bottlenecks.

Other Show Reports

AIA26: Expo Show Report 1 — Autodesk

AIA26: Expo Show Report 2 — Nemetschek Group

AIA26: Expo Show Report 3 — Trimble and SketchUp

AIA26: Expo Show Report 4 — Chaos 

AIA26: Expo Show Report 5 — neoBIM, and other AI apps

AIA26: Expo Show Report 6 — xFigura, CODii, others

AIA26: Expo Show Report 7 — Layer, Arcol, Egnyte and more…

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The company was founded recently in 2020 and is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. As a six-year-old AEC software firm, the company has grown from a niche startup to a venture-backed software platform after early pilots with over 100 leading architecture firms. In terms of their funding, prominent VC firms Graphite Ventures and the 519 Growth Fund helped PART 3 secure a major USD 2.8 million seed round.

A screenshot of PART 3 from their website showing part of their interface. PART 3 can hold all construction drawings, specs, and manuals as your single source of truth and can handle automatic sheet number numbering, ordering, and linking. It also does versioning.

The company has three co-founders: Jack Sadler, Jessica Luczycki, and Corey Stanford. Each of them has a different background, but Jessica’s background has involved years of working in construction administration.

PART 3 Is Different

What is immediately important to say about PART 3 is that the software platform has been developed for architects or whoever is the prime consultant on a construction job. It is the prime consultant who acquires and pays for the PART 3 platform, while all other stakeholders (general and subcontractors, clerk of the works, owner’s reps, the owner, and MEP and structural engineers) work as “collaborators” in the system for free.

Key Takeways

• PART 3 has been developed for architects because they deserve better tools for the CA phase of projects. 
• Only the prime consultant (usually the architect) pays for PART 3, while project “collaborators,” including engineers, contractors, owners, and reps, are free members of the system.
• PART 3 fully integrates with Procore so that if the general contractor uses Procore as their common data environment (CDE), the two systems work well together across various construction-stage workflows. 

PART 3 has a full suite of CA phase workflows and tools—from addressing the RFI and Submittals processes to managing and addressing Tasks and Assignments and Field Reports.

It also addresses project files like the construction drawings, so there is a single source of truth (SSoT) for the entire project team. The system can also handle version control, and users can also upload project manuals and specifications. To help organize things, there is a flexible folder structure in PART 3’s system.

View of PART 3’s UI when looking at the Overview screen. 

The ProjectFiles system also allows markup tools for drawings, submittals, RFI packages, and product cut sheets. PART 3 also notes that the reason why architects should want to manage their drawings inside of PART 3 rather than Procore when working on a Procore project is for complete control and visibility of the single source of truth.

On Procore integrated projects, RFIs and Submittals are automatically imported into PART 3, and you prepare your responses to both in PART 3, and those get sent to Procore.

Mobile and AI

PART 3 doesn’t have dedicated mobile apps that you download from the Apple or Google Store; instead, it operates as a Progressive Web App (PWA). Users load their browser on the mobile smartphone and go to app.part3.ca and tap the three dots in the top right and select Install App or Add to Home Screen. PART 3 is designed specifically for architectural site visits and fieldwork, and there is an offline mode so you can continue working. You can drop pins for issue locations, take field notes, log observations, and snap photos to go with. And you can distribute firm-branded PDF field reports directly from the smartphone app right from the job site.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded in PART 3, where it powers the Submittal Assistant, surfacing issues before you begin your review.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

One of the most critical things about AE professionals using the general contractor’s CDE solutions for project and CA phase management is the “disconnection factor” that typically comes down the line. At some point, the architect loses access to Procore or some other rival platform CDE. So PART 3 is fundamentally addressing that by delivering a CA platform for the architect first and foremost. All the critical work, like RFIs and submittals, happens in PART 3, and all that data remains there, even though copies are pushed to Procore. 

In a quick review of the product walk-through online, we also like PART 3’s simplified user interface and UX. This system seems very approachable, and for architects, especially those in the high-end residential market, who may not be managing all aspects of the CA phase, the critical elements they always must address—RFIs and Submittals and a single source of truth for construction drawings—appear to be managed extremely well in this system. 

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SIGGRAPH 2026 THIS YEAR WAS IN Los Angeles, California, on July 19th through July 23rd, 2026. The show had a very different atmosphere, being smaller. There are naysayers who will tell you there is a steady decline in attendance, but do attendance numbers give you a real sense of an evolving industry?

The exhibits were 6 booths deep and about 12 booths wide. Yet I found some gems worth knowing about. I think it is premature to calculate the success based on numbers on the exhibit floor, especially when you consider the Technology Papers, Technical Workshops, the Courses, Birds of a Feather, Production Sessions, Games Summit, and the private networking events throughout the conference. People still want to connect and see what new technology there is to offer. Is AI affecting attendance, or is it the downturn in the economy?

AI—The Focus

This year, there is a focus on AI for security and infrastructure, with workstations as a major topic. Windows, Linux, and Mac coexistence, GPU management, storage, monitoring systems, and cost control are part of a unified infrastructure. AI is expensive. Implementing it must be done carefully and with precision. Will studios and firms open their closed systems that were cut off due to protecting their data and IP?

Workstations will need to access tools on the web and many types of AI services with a new way to secure their infrastructure. AEC is not a focus of SIGGRAPH, but the technology is no longer about a profession. It is about identifying technological breakthroughs and products that can be valuable to architects, engineers, and construction professionals, as well as media and entertainment industry professionals.

NVIDIA was once again a major sponsor at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. The company highlighted its new NVIDIA RTX Spark superchip among other silicon technologies like its powerful GPUs for workstations and laptops.

In a time of chip shortages for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM, it is a good idea to explore new companies and technologies that have left a significant gap in the market, with a focus on data centers & AI. Generative AI is no longer trying to replace real artists or creators in the creative space after high-profile industry lawsuits.  The focus is on tools to help artists to work more efficiently. Copyright law is clear about creating with the human hand and AI. This is why navigating this space is no longer just about what AI can do; it is also about setting boundaries. I wanted to talk about affordable technologies and solutions in a time of shortages, so M&E industry creatives and AEC professionals can discover new tools.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA was a major sponsor of the conference. NVIDIA has invested significant time and effort in developing technologies for data centers. A few of these technologies will help create pipelines in the creative space.

Lately, NVIDIA GPUs for the Pro market have been difficult to get, so I wanted to see what technology was available now or new. NVIDIA did a keynote discussing neural rendering techniques, world models, and simulation methods for AI.

The NVIDIA RTX Spark superchip powers a sample OEM laptop running the Windows for ARM operating system. Architosh has written extensively about the significance of the ARM architecture in the broader computing landscape.

NVIDIA showed off its RTX Spark Superchip powering a Windows laptop, delivering up to 1 petaflop of AI performance. RTX Spark gives creators the power to render 90 GB 3D scenes, edit 12K 4:2:2 video, generate 4K AI videos, run 120B-parameter LLMs with up to 1 million tokens of context locally, and play AAA games at 1440p at over 1,000 frames per second.

MORE: NVIDIA unveils RTX Spark—ARM-based Superchip for Windows PCs

Adobe is re-architecting Photoshop and Premiere from the ground up for the Spark chip to double AI graphics performance. NVIDIA RTX Spark will be available from multiple PC makers in the fall. RTX Spark is also available as a standalone box.

NVIDIA RTX Spark laptop specs include:

• Up to 6,144 Core
• Up to 20 Core Grace CPU
• Up to 1 Petaflop GP4 AI Performance
• Up to 128 GB Unified Memory
• All-day battery life.

I watched an example at the NVIDIA booth: a large section of a city displayed in full high resolution, moving seamlessly without stutter on the new laptops. It can be a great option for smaller architectural firms looking for affordable GPU solutions. Moreover, the new NVIDIA RTX Spark Superchip laptops are battery-life comparable to Apple’s industry-leading laptops, giving creative professionals incredible processing performance all day long. These systems will be excellent for mobile professionals in M&E as well as AEC.

Autodesk

Autodesk had a booth on the show floor this year, focusing on its product FLOW. If you are using humans or characters in your scenes.

The Autodesk booth was focused on FLOW and, of course, Autodesk Maya. Maya continues to be a dominant tool in the M&E industry, but it has long since been of serious interest to AEC visualization professionals.

FLOW was demonstrating the latest AI-powered tools in FLOW and Maya, making creation more efficient, as well as other updates to their full creative suites. Autodesk featured their Vision series in a huge conference room with projects using the new AI workflow from different major companies like Riot Games, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), Framestore, and more.

Autodesk University will be the focus of the AEC industry, so please look for this report in September.

TRIPO

Tripo is a new company focused on general-purpose artificial intelligence. Tripo is a native generative platform and a series of AI 3D foundational models.  Tripo wants to democratize creativity for creatives worldwide, enabling them to create, experience, and interact with high-quality spatial content.

TRIPO chief scientist Yanpei Cao.

Chief scientist Yanpei Cao spoke about the company’s clear direction and business model, explaining how simplified their platform is for users. The business seems to focus on games, but you can see how creating certain objects for architectural renderings would be quick and easy on this platform.

TRIPO booth at SIGGRAPH 2026.

Tripo recently received a $200 million investment for their research project, Project Eden. Project Eden is building the foundations of interactive worlds that are persistent, multi-agent, and universally authorable. After seeing it at SIGGRAPH, I will have to admit it is quite impressive.  If you are interested in building quick, easy objects for your projects, this is indeed a company worth exploring.

STEG AI

Steg AI is a forensic watermarking business for content security. The forensic watermarking tools for provenance, content leak protection, and deepfake security. The tools Steg AI creates protect videos, images, documents, and audio from misuse.  Their products include:

• Leak Protection and Tracking that can save content creators, marketing, and security teams from millions of dollars in revenue. Protecting your brand.
• Content Provenance creates a watermark embedded into your content. It provides authenticity verification to protect customers, employees, and your brand.
• Copyright Protection with forensic watermarking, so that each time an asset is downloaded, we apply an imperceptible watermark that points back to the user, license, and metadata.

Architects, Engineers, and Construction professionals must protect their work; it was refreshing to see a company like this among AI companies that have built businesses to protect your IP. AEC clients will appreciate the protection of their work while working for their clients.

BOLT Graphics

Bolt Graphics was a refreshing new company on the show floor at  SIGGRAPH. A new GPU company focused on the creative market. Jill Mueller, CMO and Creative Director, was at the booth demonstrating the new Zeus GPU for HPC, Rendering, & Gaming.

MORE: Bolt Graphics’ Advanced GPU to Take On Nvidia

Ms. Mueller comes from an interior design background, and she teamed up with Darwesh Singh, the founder, CEO, and CTO, to build something from the ground up for creatives who need a great graphics card at a reasonable price point. (starting at possibly USD 1,000)

Jill Mueller, CMO and Creative Director of Bolt Graphics. A new GPU architecture and board maker doesn’t pop up every day in the computer graphics industry, so the news about Bolt was exciting to say the least. Architosh has covered the news in a separate detailed report here.

Zeus features include:

• GPU can be a “Standalone PC” with a high-performance RISC-V CPU inside Zeus, so you can run it as a standalone PC with Linux out of the box.
• User-expandable memory so you are in control and can upgrade the memory based on the work you do. Up to 384 GB in your PCIe card or 9 TB in the 2U server. The unique architecture allows for memory to be shared across chips. (Preventing crashes.)
• Designed for Scale. There is a 400/800 Ethernet on the Zeus so you can directly connect all the GPU’s together or switch without expensive and high-latency network cards. (Definitely cost-effective.)

The first Zeus GPU cards will not be ready until the end of 2027 for a select few, and mass production is expected in 2028. Considering the chip shortages, this is a welcome relief for artists and those in AEC, especially given the performance projections of the GPU.

Maxon

Maxon was on the show floor at SIGGRAPH, and the coolest thing I saw was Maxon Cinema 4D on the iPad Pro. (see: Architosh, “Cinema 4D Comes to the iPad” 8 May 2026)

Cinema 4D on the iPad Pro is a big deal in the M&E industry. Digital content creators often use sketching as the starting point of the creation process, so tools that work on the iPad with the Apple Pencil are huge.

It was seamless and easy to use. It has not been released yet but after seeing how well ZBrush runs on the M chips by Apple, you can see how wonderful a platform the iPad Pro will be in the creative space with software like Cinema 4D.

ZBrush is another major tool from Maxon in M&E.

I believe running Cinema 4D on an iPad Pro brings an affordable solution for creatives. I can’t wait to use the Apple Pencil and play with it.  If you are a Mac user, the seamless integration will be really strong.

Wacom

Wacom introduced their new affordable Android tablets called Movink Pad to artists at SIGGRAPH that are wonderful for creating and drawing on a tablet the way you would with your hand with multiple tools.

Wacom tablets are a gold standard in the DCC industry.

It comes at an incredible price point starting at $450. I would like to point out that, unlike the iPad Pro or iPad, it does not yet run certain software apps, such as Final Draft or certain enterprise packages, so if you need to run other software, you may still need your iPad.

X-GRIDS

X-GRIDS is 3D content production powered by Multi-SLAM 3D Gaussian Splatting technology. Architosh has written about Gaussian Splatting technology several times recently (see: Architosh, “Chaos Launches Corona 14 with AI Material Tools and Gaussian Splat Support” 20 Nov 2025).

Lixel K2 is their gold standard for lightweight scanners. X-GRIDS showcased their LCC 2.0, an open-source LCC2 format, with the newly released LCC Plugin for Unreal Engine—enabling real-time rendering of 100M= Gaussian Splats for high-fidelity UE Virtual Production.

X-GRIDS’ new Lixel K2 is ideal for the AEC industry as a powerful portable, lightweight 3D scanner.

With LCC2, what you capture can work smoothly with a wide range of platforms and visualization tools.  It turns captures into interactive cinematic scenes.

X-Grids is used by AEC professionals for Façade Measurement, Real Estate Survey, Reverse BIM Modeling, and BIM Construction Management. The integration of the LCC plugin for Unreal Engine will make high-powered visualization easier.

Innovative technologies & Closing Thoughts

HP and Dell both showed off recent workstations and claimed that Blackwell GPU RTX Pro workstations are available now. As has been typical in recent years, Apple did not attend SIGGRAPH despite the popularity of Macs and iPads with DCC (digital content creation) industry professionals.

Despite this, I do think Apple hardware can provide an option for artists who need a powerful solution and are still within a reasonable price range. Apple’s lineup of professional hardware products, including the iPad Pro, is used by professionals to build their pipelines. Like all computer makers, Apple raised its prices due to a RAM shortage, but the Mac Studio and MacBook Pro are still amazing workhorses and are reasonably priced solutions for professionals.

NVIDIA helped drive demand for GPUs, and in some ways, because of the AI datacenter craze and shortages, demand for another GPU maker in Bolt Graphics. The new NVIDIA RTX Spark Superchip-based workstations running Windows on ARM offer stunning AI, GPU, and CPU performance and performance per watt ratios that only Apple and Qualcomm have touched. These pose solid alternatives for professionals using MacBook Pros today who need top-line absolute compute performance for 3D and animation or film editing workflows, but only if a Windows on ARM native version of their tools of choice is available. Professional software for Windows on ARM is beginning to materialize, with Adobe working on native products, and others already in existence.

If you need a high-end traditional workstation, Dell, Lenovo, and HP can certainly accommodate. This article doesn’t cover everything at SIGGRAPH 2026 because I wanted to focus on solutions for everyday artists. I hope that some of the options I discovered will help make it easier to find what is right for you.  There is more news to come.  Count on it.

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The multi-year commitment encompasses a complete overhaul of Newforma’s technology stack—spanning its flagship Newforma Project Center and native SaaS Newforma Konekt platforms—while laying the compliance groundwork for FedRAMP readiness to serve highly regulated public-sector clients.

AI Roadmap & Key

To execute the technical transformation, Newforma has partnered with zeb, an AWS Premier Tier Partner specializing in AI and cloud engineering. The collaboration focuses on four pivotal operational areas:

• Generative AI via Amazon Bedrock: Development of intelligent, automated tools for compliance tracking, contract administration, and complex document review.
• Platform Modernization: Upgrading legacy and on-premises cloud bridges in Newforma Project Center while continuing the cloud-native evolution of Newforma Konekt.
• FedRAMP Compliance: Preparing Newforma’s cloud infrastructure to meet strict federal security standards, enabling broader enterprise adoption among defense and infrastructure contractors.
• Enterprise Scalability: Improving speed, uptime, and cross-platform performance across complex architectural and engineering datasets.

“This collaboration marks an important milestone for Newforma and our customers,” said Peter Cannone, Chief Executive Officer of Newforma. “We’ve spent years helping AECO firms embrace digital transformation through both on-prem and cloud solutions that improve collaboration and project delivery. By deepening our relationship with AWS, we’re investing in the next generation of our platform, giving customers greater flexibility, stronger security, faster innovation, and a foundation for the AI-powered workflows that shape the future of our industry.”

Mal Vivek, CEO of zeb, stated:

“Newforma’s work with AWS will unlock powerful AI capabilities for AECO firms, from generative AI through Amazon Bedrock to scalable cloud infrastructure built for their most demanding workloads,” said Rich Geraffo, Vice President & Managing Director, AWS North America. “We’re proud to help the industry that builds our world shape its digital future.”

Newforma Preparedness

“This is much more than an infrastructure initiative,” said Ben Bazso, Chief Technology Officer of Newforma. “We’re strengthening the technology platform that powers Newforma today while creating the flexibility to deliver new AI capabilities, deeper integrations, and continuous innovation for years to come. Working alongside AWS and zeb allows us to further optimize our cloud platforms and accelerate our AI roadmap, providing customers with greater performance, resilience, and choice as their technology needs continue to evolve.”

Architosh Analysis & Commentary

Newforma is committed to moving beyond its on-premise heritage. For two decades, Newforma Project Center has served as the backbone of document control, email indexing, and administrative tracking for leading architecture and engineering firms. However, its historical reliance on local server infrastructure often presented modern hybrid firms with deployment challenges.

This seven-year commitment with AWS signals Newforma’s definitive shift toward a unified, cloud-first ecosystem—pairing the deep submittal/RFI search powers of Project Center with the modern web-based issue tracking of Newforma Konekt.

By choosing Amazon Bedrock as its generative AI engine, Newforma gains access to leading foundation models without exposing proprietary firm data or project records. In an industry where unstructured data—specifically decades of email correspondence, spec books, and drawing sets—causes significant administrative friction, applying AI to automate document review and compliance could save AECO project managers hundreds of hours per year.

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As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates across the architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) sector, technology leaders face a growing paradox: teams are eagerly experimenting with AI, but they are doing so in fragmented, localized silos. Disconnected datasets, proprietary formats, and isolated spreadsheets continue to create duplicate effort rather than actionable intelligence—all while amplifying data governance and security risks for enterprise CIOs.

Key Takeaways

• Revizto adds new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which converts Revizto project data into an AI-queryable format.
• Revizto users can now use natural language prompts inside their preferred LLM (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, etc) and ask natural language queries.
• Adds Model & Object Properties API — provides real-time access to model and object data including material types, systems, fire ratings, quantities, and more, without opening the Revizto application.

Revizto’s latest update tackles this head-on by establishing a unified, open, and secure data intelligence layer, letting firms leverage custom AI agents and BI tools against live project models without sacrificing control over their intellectual property.

Tackling Tech Bloat in AEC/O

The release arrives on the heels of Revizto’s Bridging the Gap Report 2026, which highlighted critical industry bottlenecks:

• Bandwidth & Training Deficit: For the second consecutive year, 32% of construction leaders cited a lack of time and capacity as their primary barrier to adopting new software.
• Sovereignty Concerns: A staggering 96% of organizations expressed anxiety regarding data ownership and control when deploying emerging technologies.
• Stack Consolidation: Rather than adopting niche, single-purpose apps, 39% of firms are actively planning to simplify their technology stacks in favor of multi-functional, connected platforms.

Revizto’s Bridging the Gap Report 2026 concludes: “AEC organizations are prioritizing tech consolidation, favoring connected platforms that deliver great value with less operational complexity.”

Technical Summary

At the heart of Revizto’s release are three distinct technology components that streamline data access across cross-platform AEC environments (macOS, Windows, iPadOS, and Web):

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server —  Technical Role = Bridges Revizto project data with LLMs and AI agents; Primary Use Case = Natural language querying (e.g., “Find unresolved Level 3 clashes”)
• Model & Object Properties API — Technical Role = Real-time headless access to model/object metadata; Primary Use Case = Automated QTO, carbon tracking, procurement, and FM handovers
• Developer Portal (OAuth 2.0) — Technical Role = Enterprise-grade access control & app registration; Primary Use Case = Streamlined developer workflows, API updates, and role management

MCP Server

Instead of requiring complex, custom-built integrations to parse proprietary BIM schemas, the new MCP Server converts rich Revizto project data into an AI-queryable format. Project managers can use natural language prompts inside their preferred LLM—asking natural queries such as:

• “Which fire doors are currently missing certification documents?”
• “What are the top five unresolved structural-to-MEP clashes on Level 3?”

The system returns context-aware answers in seconds, drastically reducing manual audits and static spreadsheet reports.

Model & Object Properties API

This headless API grants real-time programmatic access to granular BIM metadata—including material assemblies, fire ratings, system classifications, and spatial quantities—without needing to open the native Revizto desktop app. This enables automated workflows for:

• Live Quantity Take-Offs (QTO) and cost estimation engines.
• Embodied Carbon Dashboards reading live material specs.
• Digital Handover & FM Systems populating asset management databases downstream.

The possibilities for connections and use cases are much wider than the good but obvious choices shown above.

Modernized Developer Portal

Replacing legacy, manual access-code management, the new portal introduces industry-standard OAuth 2.0 app registration. Account admins and enterprise software developers now have self-serve controls to register applications, handle security permissions, and receive direct updates as Revizto’s API infrastructure evolves.

To learn more about Revizto, click here.

Architosh Analysis & Commentary

Revizto has built its reputation as one of the fastest, most reliable issue tracking and 3D coordination environments in the AEC industry—particularly revered for its high-performance hybrid engine across both Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows environments.

With this update, Revizto is strategically repositioning itself from a coordination viewer into a centralized project data hub.

The decision to embrace the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard is a shrewd move. Rather than building a closed, proprietary “Revizto AI” chatbot that locks customers into a single LLM vendor, Revizto is providing the pipe. IT directors can connect their own private, enterprise-governed AI instances (whether OpenAI, Anthropic, or custom local models) directly to live model data. This directly addresses the 96% data sovereignty concern highlighted in their report: your data stays in your cloud, accessed only by your AI tools.

A final point from their industry report is that AEC organizations are frustrated with tech stack inflation and subscription fatigue. Reaching this tipping point, software vendors must either become extensible platforms or risk being consolidated out of customer tech stacks. 

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AI Compliance

CODii

This company was completely new to us at AIA this year and focuses on using AI technologies to streamline project requirements. Essentially, users link folders to the systems, and CODii does the rest. These folders can live in systems like SharePoint or Google Drive, and CODii automatically classifies every connected document as a requirement or deliverable.

CODii is a new compliance AI tool that works on your own project data as organized in linked folders. Do AI inference on your project’s complete data.

The goal here is to have one searchable source of truth regarding every project obligation you, as an architect, need to meet. It also addresses deliverables, be they drawings and specifications or reports and calculations. Essentially, this gives you and your firm team the ability to ask natural language questions against your project documents. You are doing AI inference against your data to perform quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC).

CodeComply.AI

Nothing was more thematic at AIA26 this year than using artificial intelligence (AI) to perform code reviews on your documents and models. Unlike Architosh’s BEST of SHOW winner Kestrel Labs, CodeComply.AI works with uploaded plan sets. The company says, “CodeComply turns your plan set into a live, code-aware workspace—run jurisdiction-specific checks, test design alternatives, and produce cited documentation in the same tool you use to validate your drawings.”

CodeComply.AI in action. The UI is in white with shades of pink and gray, with tools on the left and a dialog box panel on the right.

CodeComply.AI has a nice workflow and UI/UX for a tool working with plan sets alone. However, the limitation of tools that work with plan sets alone is that your code review process still needs to return to your authoring BIM solution. For many architects, this may not be a big deal. CodeComply also has a feature called VersionVue, which allows the user to compare plan versions, highlighting every change. This is again using AI technologies to compare your document versions. You can use smart filters to focus on only what matters most in the comparison. Like Bluebeam’s Compare features, color coding is used to show the original plan and what’s new.

Back to codes, this application works with IBC, IPC, IMC, NFPA 101, ADA, FHA, state-amended building and residential codes, and custom jurisdictions can be easily added. It works on any building type.

Other AI Software

xFigura.Ai

xFigura.AI has some notable world-class architecture firms listed as customers on its homepage. The AI platform offers over 45 AI models, and they are curated for the architectural process. These include abilities such as text-to-render, render enhancement, image-to-render, sketch-to-render, image-to-video, image-to-3D, rendering relighting, InPainting, design boards, and more.

xFigura AI uses a node-based system for linking various functions and data. This takes place on an infinite canvas.

With xFigura, the canvas is an infinite board where you build, connect, and generate. Everything done in Figura lives on the canvas. There are no tabs, just one vast canvas which is your creative space. On the canvas, you can create and organize nodes. The node interface will instantly feel familiar to Grasshopper users, but Figura isn’t like Grasshopper. This is not an advanced algorithm-aided design (AAD) software. It is much easier than that.

Visualization Software

D5 Render

D5 Render was at AIA26 and enjoyed excellent traffic from North American architects curious to learn how real-time visualization works and how it differs from the competition. In Architosh’s view, D5 is highly competitive with the best real-time interactive renderers in the global market across a range of metrics, including visual quality and feature set.

An image of D5 Render at AIA26 in San Diego on the show floor.

Realized not long after AIA26, D5 Render version 3.1 was released, with a shift in focus toward supporting interaction in collaboration workflows. Architosh covered version 3.1 in detail, which you can read here. (see: Architosh, “D5 Render 3.1: The Future of Architectural Design Reviews,” 17 Jun 2026).

Architosh Analysis: While D5 has been historically Windows-only due to a reliance on Windows DirectX 12 and DXR ray-tracing, the rendering company has announced this year that D5 Render is officially coming to the Mac. The D5 Render Engine is a proprietary real-time rendering engine built from the ground up by D5 specifically for the field of architecture. Unlike game industry rendering engines like Unreal (used in Twinmotion), the D5 Engine is optimized to handle the massive architectural datasets and complex lighting with a high degree of efficiency. 

D5 leverages full path tracing, a higher form of ray tracing, and is built with a custom shader architecture that provides native optimal support on both Windows (DX12) and macOS (Metal). For those Mac users clamoring to get a Mac version, there is an official D5 Render Mac Waitlist here. Importantly, on M3 and higher, Apple Silicon supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, so Mac users may need to update their systems once this native macOS version ships. For the D5 Mac curious who cannot wait, their Mac-native options include Twinmotion, Enscape, Blender, and the new Maxon Redshift Render for AEC. 

Lumion

Lumion was arguably the premier real-time, interactive renderer when such rendering applications first emerged a decade ago. Despite its visual benefits, the software has long been noted for being resource-intensive and Windows-only. As Mac computers continue to gain market share worldwide and within architecture programs in college, this Windows-only posture is starting to change.

Lumion View is Mac-native and works with the latest macOS versions of SketchUp. This is a lightweight real-time rendering plugin that functions as a design companion, offers conceptual-style preset render settings (like clay, wood, etc.), supports customized artificial lights (point, spot, area), and provides quick 4K rendered output. However, the Mac version uses rasterization, as the developer’s native ray tracing and dynamic sky-cloud environments are still in development on the Mac.

Meanwhile, the latest Lumion 2026.1 update supports ray-traced panoramas, a new pattern editor, parallax interiors, and more.

Financial Software

Factor A/E

Factor A/E is financial software for the architect or designer’s practice. This includes all time-keeping, project financial planning and performance tracking, reporting, resource scheduling, and billing. The company says it is the most adaptable platform in the AE industry and thus is flexible enough for how various firms work and charge.

Factor A/E has firms covered with detailed and comprehensive financial dashboards.

Factor A/E is touted as more customizable than Monograph, particularly for invoices. As for fee-type billing, for firms that bill simply by hourly or a fixed fee, both Monograph and Factor A/E have you covered. However, for firms that charge a percentage of construction costs as their fee, these solutions stand apart. Factor A/E handles percentage of construction cost billing as a simplified Fixed Fee workaround. Mapping a percentage contract to Fixed Fee this way isn’t ideal, and that is where BQE, with its built-in Percentage contract rules, shines.

Monograph

The initial distinguishing feature of Monograph is its gorgeous user-interface graphics and information clarity. Monograph shines above its nearest competitors, Factor A/E and BQE, in this regard. Touted as “firm management software for architects and engineers,” Monograph is trusted by over 16,000 architects and engineers.

Monograph does full project accounting, builds budgets, assigns staff, forecasts performance, and handles billing and payments. Both Monograph, Factor A/E, and BQE offer compelling features and benefits, and all of them offer detailed pre-flight onboarding experiences as part of considering the software for adoption.

You can visit them online here:  Factor A/E, Monograph, and BQE.

Other Show Reports

AIA26: Expo Show Report 1 — Autodesk

AIA26: Expo Show Report 2 — Nemetschek Group

AIA26: Expo Show Report 3 — Trimble and SketchUp

AIA26: Expo Show Report 4 — Chaos 

AIA26: Expo Show Report 5 — neoBIM, and other AI apps

AIA26: Expo Show Report 6 — xFigura, CODii, others

AIA26: Expo Show Report 7 — Layer, Arcol, Egnyte and more…

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The Group legally closed its largest company acquisition to date, Heavy Construction Systems Specialists, LLC (HCSS), on 1 July 2026. The launch of Bluebeam Max as the Group’s first comprehensive agentic AI solution for the construction industry has been a significant milestone for the company as part of its broad AI strategy.

Financial Results:

In general, the Nemetschek Group’s earnings have grown by more than 10% over the past five years (on average), while the past year has seen growth of more than triple that. Here is a summary of its recent financials:

• Q2 (2026) revenue of EUR 327.7 million (+14.5%)
• Q2 EBITDA (currency-adjusted) is EUR 98.6 million (+15.8%)
• Q2 Net Income is EUR 66 million (25.4%)
• +25.3% growth in earnings per share to EUR 0.57 in Q2
• Q2 EBITDA margin reported at 30.1% (adjusted for acquisition-related one-off costs at 31.0%

Group revenue for H1, 2026 increased to EUR 640.7 million (USD 736.2 million), representing a constant-currency growth rate of 15.7% (reported: 11.9%).

Nemetschek Group – Q2 and H1 2026.

“The first half of 2026 was characterized by continued very strong operational performance and important strategic milestones for the Nemetschek Group,” says Yves Padrines, CEO of the Nemetschek Group. “With the successful closing of the HCSS acquisition, the largest acquisition in the company’s history, we are strengthening our market position in the infrastructure and heavy civil construction sector, which offers very attractive long-term growth prospects. At the same time, we consistently continue to execute our AI strategy. The successful market launch of our agentic AI suite, Bluebeam Max, together with the further expansion of Group-wide AI solutions, sets new standards for the integration of AI across our industries. The combination of strong organic growth, strategic investments and a clear AI strategy provide an excellent foundation for sustained profitable growth and long-term value creation for our customers, partners and shareholders.”

Looking at Segments

The Nemetschek Group positions all of its products into market segments for the two primary industries it serves. Here are some notes on those:

• Design Segment — this segment reached Q2 revenue of EUR 142.9 million (growth of 9.9%). Margin in this segment was 22.7%. The main brands in this segment include Graphisoft, Allplan and Vectorworks (all BIM and CAD platforms). Engineering design solution companies are also in this segment, including Frilo and RISA.
• Build Segment — this segment reached Q2 revenue of EUR 142.9 million (growth of 22.4%). Margin in this segment reached 40.1%, a substantially higher level than the design segment. The main brands in this segment include Bluebeam, Nevaris, and GoCanvas. HCSS will also be in this segment.
• Manage Segment — this segment reached Q2 revenue of 13.1 million (4.6% growth). Margin was 5.1%. The primary brands in this segment are Crem Solutions and dTwin.
• Media Segment — this segment reached revenues of EUR 29.4 million (flat to slightly down, YoY). Margin was 27.7%. The primary brand is Maxon, with recent acquisitions in this segment consolidating into Maxon.

For the full year in 2026, the Group expects currency-adjusted organic revenue growth in the range of 14 – 15% for the financial year in 2026. For those who want a deeper dive or for AEC industry investors, read our deeper analysis below.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

The HSCC acquisition will impact the Group’s top and bottom lines next quarter. HSCC alone had annual 2025 revenues of over USD 215 million. Prior to the acquisition, HSCC’s annual revenue growth rate was over 21%, making it twice as strong (in growth) as the Design segment’s average organic growth rate and close to the Build segment’s. Architosh sees the Build segment accelerating growth due to multiple factors, including Bluebeam Max (a premium-tier AI-centric Bluebeam offering), HSCC’s organic rate, plus synergies within the segment, including those with GoCanvas. 

A more troubling aspect of Group is its Media segment (Maxon). Flat revenue growth is always a concern, and this may explain why Maxon began to pivot more aggressively towards the AEC visualization space over the past year, introducing real-time, interactive rendering solutions for authoring tools, beginning with Vectorworks and then Revit. The company must resist discounting those solutions to the point of projecting lower value to the market than its chief competitors in Chaos, Lumion, and D5. Instead, the Maxon solution needs to demonstrate unique value-add in the offering itself. 

Nemetschek’s forward PE Ratio is currently 24.1, which is a bit lower than its main rivals but notably low by its five-year history (see chart below).

The Nemetschek Group is doing well financially, but its stock price is down for the year, as are those of its chief rivals (Autodesk, Bentley, and Trimble). With broad real estate slowdowns and a cooling construction industry, the entire sector’s stocks are down for the year (approximately 26% for Nemetschek and Autodesk and 32% for Trimble). However, these financial results reported yesterday have seen the stock (ETRA:NEM) shoot up dramatically. 

This five-year view of the PE ratio for Nemetschek clearly shows that through most of the past five years, the PE ratio has been over 30, reflecting the company’s strong earnings growth and free cash flow generation.

Looking forward, Nemetschek is currently undervalued by most analysts. Simply Wall Street has it at 40%+ undervalued. Using the Rule of 40, with 15% ± revenue growth plus 25 – 30% ± margins (= 40+), the company deserves a premium multiple (30-40PE). With HSCC’s revenue and margin contribution, the Nemetschek Group is currently a very attractive stock buy. Adding further optimism are the company’s broader AI strategy, the Bluebeam Max rollout, and AI in general. 

Nemetschek Earnings Growth forecasts and recent history show clear strength and upward momentum.

Architosh sees the AEC/O industry finding new paths to higher revenue as agentic AI solutions drive clear value in automating the mundane and tedious in AEC workflows. Bluebeam Max’s implementation is a crystal clear indicator of what AI success looks like for revenue expansion. Take a product that is already a standard on a subscription customer base and offer a higher-tier offering that offers highly attractive benefits. With the broad construction industry stalled or cooling, the take-up for more premium AI offerings will be slower than if the construction industry were doing well, but the take-up will still manifest for products with clear ROI. 

Disclaimer: This content is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as professional financial, investment, or legal advice. Investing involves risk, including the loss of principal. Always conduct your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

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Zeus Platform

Bolt Graphics is based in Sunnyvale, California, and is an emerging semiconductor startup. They design graphics processing units (GPUs) tailored specifically for four key industries:  (1) Architecture & Design, (2) Film and Television, (3) HPC, and (4) Gaming.

Founder, CEO, and CTO Darwesh Singh teamed up with an interior designer to build a brand-new GPU architecture from scratch, and the company officially launched in 2020, securing funding rounds in 2021-2022 and revealing its patent-pending ray-tracing architecture in 2023-2024. The “Zeus” chip architecture was introduced in early 2026.

Bolt Graphics’ upcoming Zeus GPU architecture will come in multiple configurations and setups, including cloud and server options.

Zeus utilizes a RISC-V command processor and an in-house designed SIMD layout. Notably, the company shuns AI upscaling shortcuts, focusing purely on raw path-tracing silicon power to cut rendering costs by up to 17x.

The company completed its first physical tape-out of its first 12nm Zeus test chip in April 2026, and they were prominently at SIGGRAPH 2026 touting their new GPU.

Performance and Details

The Zeus architecture utilizes path tracing, a more advanced form of ray tracing that more accurately simulates light. Path tracing is computationally more expensive than ray tracing but needs more rays to converge on clean results (reduce noise). Today’s GPUs don’t have enough performance to compute enough rays for real-time path tracing. That is Bolt Graphics’ consensus.

Bolt Graphics claims that one needs 28 Zeus GPUs to achieve real-time path tracing, compared to 280 Nvidia RTX 5090 GPUs. The Nvidia RTX 5090 is Bolt’s reference card. So the Zeus 1C is 2.5x faster than the 5090 in path tracing performance, while the Zeus 2C is 5x faster, and Zeus 4C is 10x faster.

The Zeus GPU comes in three different versions, including other stats:

• Process: 12nm
• Bolt Zeus 1C, 2C and 4C
• Board Power: 120W, 250W, and 500W, respectively
• FP64: 5, 10, 20 TFLOPS
• FP16 Vector: 20, 40, 80 TFLOPS
• On-Chip Memory: 128, 256, 512 MB
• Memory: 32-160 GB, 64-384 GB, 256-2,304 GB
• Path Tracing: 77, 154, and 307 gigarays

Bolt Graphics notes that currently adding ray or path tracing features in real-time applications (games, real-time renderers, metaverse experiences, etc) lowers performance by more than half. Games without ray or path tracing enable achieving greater than 60 FPS, but the same game goes to less than 30 FPS when ray-traced shadows and reflections are turned on.

Bolt Graphics’ Zeus architecture with Glowstick real-time path tracing technology.

Glowstick is Bolt’s real-time path tracer and is aiming to provide that technology inside the viewports of Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, SketchUp, Houdini, and others.

Of course, we haven’t written about other technical issues, like material textures, USD integration (which Bolt’s Zeus has), and how programmable the Glowstick shading pipeline is (quite programmable, indeed). On the platform development side, support for tooling on x86, RISC-V, ARM, and Windows (coming soon) is all noted in Bolt’s literature.

To learn more, you can visit their website here.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Bolt Graphics is an exciting development, especially given the difficulty the rendering and animation professional communities have had over the past few years with the rise of general AI and the demand-side pressure that has driven up the cost of GPUs and now memory. Bolt’s Zeus GPU architecture promises substantial performance-per-dollar metrics over what AMD and Nvidia are currently delivering. But it is also about power, with substantial performance per watt differentiation, a story akin to Apple’s M-series processor advantages in the general computer market. 

Again, we learned about Zeus from SIGGRAPH this year and hope to have much to share about the GPU market in the creative industries of DCC and AEC in an upcoming report. Just to be clear, Bolt Graphics is targeting the Architecture industry with its own page on workflows, with software integrations focused on common architecture tools like SketchUp, Revit, AutoCAD, and Unreal Engine (used in Twinmotion). It goes without saying that we are quite excited to see this development. 

Initial hardware delivery for Bolt Graphics Zeus GPUs is targeted for December 2027, so we are more than a year and a half away, and that is after the work of porting its architecture to the TSCM 5nm process node. 

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A Curated Selection

What follows is a non-alphabetically ordered curated selection of companies we were introduced to on the show floor, heard about from various sources, or researched before and after our attendance. Many of these we already know, while quite a few are newcomers. We will start with the newcomers and those that really interested us the most.

neoBIM GmbH

This relatively new AEC software company is based in Germany, and its founder and CEO, Moritz Luck, was the co-founder of the award-winning Enscape real-time, interactive rendering program. Its chief product officer (CPO) is also a former CEO of one of the Nemetschek Group’s major daughter companies. So if we want to think about this as a music band, two leaders of this new German software company have hit albums that have gone platinum status—sticking with the music analogy for a moment.

So what does neoBIM do? What do they make?

At AIA26 we had a chance to see their products (including ones under development) up close. Their current shipping products include a series of digital tools under the buildOS moniker. These are “AEC tools, built from the AI up.” That is a bit of a moniker for them.

Each tool solves a real bottleneck, and each tool can be used by itself or together on newBIM’s buildOS platform.

An image of Gen, by neoBIM GmbH of Germany. (Image: neoBIM)

Tool one is called Gen. This looked and felt like TestFit but with a twist and a bit supercharged. You select your plot (building site), and Gen drafts up every code-compliant build the site can hold. You can select a solution and then start manipulating it. The process is a four-step one: Enter an address. See what you can build. Know if it pays. And finally, take over time. It’s at this last step that you can begin to move, resize, redraw, and manipulate any of the building solutions directly.

At the same time, all the numerical data you need to test sites with real buildings and real programs is given to you in real time as you manipulate the model. Finding out what a project is worth (what it pays): Gen works with buildable GFA and unit mix, then with GDV, yield, cost per sq ft, and net return, using local market data.

Another image of Gen, from neoBIM GmbH. At AIA26, Gen was making some noise and the cognoscenti of digital tools in AEC were whispering about it. (Image: neoBIM)

Once you are done working out sites and a solution in neoBIM’s Gen tool, you export 3D Revit or IFC models, PDFs of plans and views, etc.

Other tools this company now has include Insider (which reads every council meeting in 250+ German municipalities), zoning changes, design competitions, etc. This is about winning the work. Tender is their third tool, and it manages the Tendering phase process.

Finally, we got a sneak peek at this company’s brand new AI-first oriented BIM authoring application under development. It is important to note that today’s BIM authoring tools (all the desktop-era ones) require substantial re-architecting at the data and metadata levels to be best-fit for the agentic AI era.

This image shows neoBIM’s AEC industry-first BIM tool, written from the ground up for agentic AI. The move from today’s BIMs to the future of agentic AI BIMs means moving from a database schema that is strictly deterministic versus data structures that natively support “probabilistic multi-states”

Desktop-era models are saved in large, proprietary relational databases. An agentic AI-native BIM tool replaces static, monolithic files with dynamic, semantic data streams designed for machine comprehension and real-time collaboration. The real-time part is already part of the BIM 2.0 definition this publication—and AEC Magazine principly—have solidly defined and written about. But BIM 2.0 emerged prior to OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT and Anthropic’s model context protocol (MCP server model). That means tools like neeBIM’s new BIM engine represent true agentic AI-first platform technology for the AI era.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

A completely brand new BIM platform engine that is agentic-AI-centric is an exciting new prospect in the AEC market, and this company was getting a lot of attention and discussion on the show floor by other digital tools providers. That alone says quite a bit. This is a company that we intend to watch very closely, and we encourage Architosh readers to explore their technology and solutions. 

Archistar Inc.

Archistar is from Australia, and we have written about the company a few times inside our Xpresso newsletter, where we focus on emTech (emerging technologies) in AEC/O. From the earliest years, we have been impressed with Archistar but wondered how this Australian software company was going to grow globally or to the US.

Initially, Archistar launched as a platform aimed at property finding and planning workflows, recognizing that historically architects and developers spent weeks digesting zoning codes and regulations impacting what you could do with a given property. Interestingly, this is the kind of thing that is now partially automated with the Gen tool we just wrote about above from neoBIM GmbH.

Archistar eCheck is an AI PreCheck plan review application.

Archistar would allow users to select a plot of land and instantly generate thousands of compliant 3D building concepts on it (from apartments, mixed-use, townhomes, etc), all tailored to local building and zoning limitations. This is still a great pain point to solve, by the way, but the Australian company did a major pivot and now offers an AI PreCheck application (formerly eCheck).

Today, Archistar is an AI plan review platform, and using AI technology to review for compliance was a very hot topic this year at AIA26. What makes Archistar different from, say, Kestrel Labs’ compliance platform is the target audience. Archistar is built for local governments. The software can read CAD, PDF, and BIM files and evaluate them automatically against compliance regulations (zoning, building codes, etc).

Another interesting pivot is the North American one. With capital raises of USD 22 million in 2022, the Australian firm opened offices in Los Angeles and Vancouver. The platform is now used by over 30 major North American cities, including LA County, the City of Austin, and New York City.

Archistar still offers its earlier generative design solutions. There is a free Archistar to Autodesk Forma integration.

MeltPlan 

This is another well-funded (to the tune of USD 14 million) AI-native planning engine for pre-construction. MeltPlan handles building code, cost, scheduling, and value planning. These activities are addressed through Melt Code, Melt Takeoff, and Melt Bid.

For architects, MeltPlan offers instant, expert-grade compliance research to guide design decisions. This is not a black-box AI system that doesn’t reveal its AI methodologies and knowledge paths. MeltPlan says its system is trained to understand building industry knowledge, including codes and standards, AEC ontologies, building elements and assemblies, quantities and scopes. And every result comes with clear reasoning explained. There is even a visualization created. (see image below).

MeltPlan can produce 3D visuals that can illustrate code review analysis results.

Then there is Melt Bid, to “level bids in minutes, not hours,” as their tagline suggests. This solution works in the cloud or in Excel and helps professionals level bids up to 10x faster than traditional workflows. Using AI, the system generates a full comparison of uploaded bids based on your template in minutes, not hours. To learn more about MeltPlan, visit them online.

Mosaic

Finally, Mosaic is another new company to us, and it’s a project resource planning, management, and forecasting application. This is a solution aimed at larger organizations, and the general philosophy is simple—when work is planned, everything goes better downstream, schedules stabilize, utilization rates rise, and profitability follows.

A view of Mosaic on an iPad at AIA26 inside their booth.

Mosaic’s AI technology automatically generates work assignments and decides based on who has the skills needed and their schedule availability. Of course, even well-laid plans change, and Mosaic has patented technology that automatically adjusts schedules smartly based on these changes.

Mosaic can generate and manage demand, utilization, profitability, and workloads and can determine things like when it is time to hire and for what roles and skills to hire for. The system can even predict (forecast) workload, profitability, and revenue. This kind of data and knowledge is presented smartly in live dashboards, variance reporting, and AI operational briefs so managers and leaders can see where time, budget, and schedule are tracking while there is still time to act. To learn more, visit here.

Other Show Reports

AIA26: Expo Show Report 1 — Autodesk

AIA26: Expo Show Report 2 — Nemetschek Group

AIA26: Expo Show Report 3 — Trimble and SketchUp

AIA26: Expo Show Report 4 — Chaos 

AIA26: Expo Show Report 5 — neoBIM, and other AI apps

AIA26: Expo Show Report 6 — xFigura, CODii, others

AIA26: Expo Show Report 7 — Layer, Arcol, Egnyte and more…

The post AIA26: Expo Show Floor Report 5—neoBIM and other AI apps appeared first on Architosh.

Over the years, better lighting systems, material systems, and revolutions like real-time ray tracing have narrowed the gap between architectural renderings and finished architectural photography. What was once considered exceptional has become an industry expectation.

Despite this evolution in the photorealistic 3D image of architecture, one part of the architect’s workflow has changed surprisingly little.

Rethink: The Design Review

And that is the design review process.

The folks at D5 have been doing a deep rethink of what the design review process is and what it should be like. Today, design reviews still largely focus on static images or pre-rendered animations with pre-determined camera paths. These collateral items do a very good job of documenting design decisions already made, but they rarely can participate in the review process discussion itself.

D5 3.1 shifts its focus to support “interaction” in collaboration design review workflows. This image shows how, from within D5’s Interactive Presentation workflow features, an image can easily be switched from Day to Night along with any other variable of the scene.

Participation is a high-level threshold for imagery in the design review, but an important one. As architectural practices are much more collaborative in nature, with all types of design reviews, it only makes sense that these meetings become more like the working sessions they actually are.

D5 3.1 — Interaction

Visualization, therefore, is beginning to reshape itself into a new role. Instead of just documenting design decisions made, the medium is becoming interactive. This means visualization can serve the changing nature of the design review by supporting comparison, change, and the decision-making process.

This industry shift is foundational to D5 version 3.1. Instead of asking how the rendering can become more realistic, the release focuses on how the visualization can remain more useful once the meeting begins.

D5 3.1 responds with Interactive Presentation. This is a purpose-built workflow that allows architects to organize presentations like slides while maintaining access to the live project. Teams can easily move between design schemes, materials, lighting conditions, weather settings, and viewpoints without having to prepare multiple image sets or separate animations. Instead of a sequence of predetermined image items on slides, the D5 Interactive Presentation feels like a living, collaborative design workspace.

This GIF animation shows how D5 supports team collaboration.

D5’s new Interactive Presentation sits within a broader set of tools aimed at making architectural review more immersive and adaptable. This includes support for Stereoscopic Panorama for VR to help clients understand scale and materiality at scale, along with spatial relationships that only virtual reality can convey. The Spatial Tour features have evolved with faster scene generation, smoother transitions between indoor and outdoor spaces, and dollhouse views that simplify navigation through complex projects.

D5 Lite for Rhino and Revit

Following on its earlier release for Trimble’s SketchUp, D5 Lite is now expanding to Rhino and Revit, bringing real-time visualization directly into more of the tools architects already use.

To learn more about D5 Lite for Rhino or Revit, click here.

Renderings Still Matter

D5 Render version 3.1 introduces a series of production-focused improvements to strengthen realism while preserving real-time responsiveness in the application.

One such improvement is the adoption of ACEScg Working Color Space. This is a production-grade color pipeline used in the film and visual effects industry. This improves color consistency in D5 throughout the visualization and post-production workflows. Then there is HeightField Tracing, which generates richer surface relief for displacement materials without adding geometry complexity. This will improve the look of stone, brick, timber, et cetera.

MORE: D5 Lite for Rhino and Revit Now Available

There are also improvements for landscape visualization, more nuanced via Seasonal Vegetation. A series of smaller workflow refinements—including Custom Pivot, MeasureLine, improved City Generator controls, smarter Auto Exposure, and expanded Gaussian Splatting support—reduce repetitive adjustments while maintaining continuity throughout production.

Together, these developments reinforce a broader idea: interactive presentations depend on rendering technologies capable of supporting both visual fidelity and real-time responsiveness.

See D5 3.1 Live

D5 will demonstrate the version 3.1 workflow in a live webinar on 21 July 2026 at 1:00 PM UTC. The session covers D5 Lite for Rhino and Revit, Interactive Presentation, VR review, Stereoscopic and Panorama mode, AECESgc, HeightField Tracing and Seasonal Vegetation.

Registration is available through the webinar page here, and anyone who registers but cannot attend live can receive access to the recorded session.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

D5 continues to push the envelope of interactive realism in architectural visualization. And their position that the future of design reviews in architecture is changing due to new capabilities that they are bringing to market is spot on. Readers should definitely not miss this free webinar and sign up, even if you are going to watch it recorded later. 

The addition of D5 Lite for Rhino and Revit is another major addition to the D5 user’s arsenal. You can learn more about that over here. We look forward to D5’s continued advancements, and we understand that some Mac support for D5 Lite in eligible Apple devices is in the works, though no formal timeline for that. 

The post D5 Render 3.1: The Future of Architectural Design Reviews appeared first on Architosh.

D5 Lite for Rhino

Rhino is an industry standard for architectural creation, where marquee architects formalize their innovative ideas. Rhino is also an ecosystem with a rich set of specialized tools that support generative design, parametric workflows, and environmental simulation. In many ways, Rhino is a design laboratory.

Into this environment comes D5 Lite for Rhino to bring real-time visual feedback directly into this popular modeling and simulation environment.

D5 Lite for Rhino and D5 Lite for Revit are new products with D5 Render version 3.1.

Built for Rhino, D5 Lite enables designers to preview realistic materials and lighting while they model their creations, without having to leave Rhino or wait for another rendering process. This helps designers see complex geometry and how it may actually look before the design process is finalized. It’s a visual layer for Rhino’s design culture.

D5 Lite for Revit

For Revit users, the utilization of the BIM environment for continued design exploration remains high. This is why D5 Lite for BIM users in Revit can be a big benefit to their workflows. There is no need to push the BIM model to another visualization tool and run renderings and wait and see what the results look like.

D5 Lite’s capabilities are shown off here, including: DCC Live Sync, Material Editing, Asset Placement, Lighting Controls, and Environmental Controls.

Visualization at the photorealistic level belongs inside the BIM workflow process. Designs continue to evolve all through the design development process and even into construction documentation. Having D5 Lite for Revit means users can make adjustments to the building throughout any phase and turn to D5 Lite to evaluate the outcome of that change.

D5 Lite is not intended to replace the presentation power of D5 Render. Its role is to support ideation and form-making by enabling designers to test out real lighting conditions and materials.

To learn more, sign up for a free webinar. Registration is available through the webinar page here, and anyone who registers but cannot attend live can receive access to the recorded session.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

D5 created the D5 Lite applications as an AI-native visualization plugin for the design phase. Users can explore with AI, verify and test material ideas and how they look when rendered realistically, and test lighting design and environmental lighting conditions. All of this takes place inside the native design authoring application, be it SketchUp (previously released) or now Rhino and Revit. To learn more, visit here. 

The post D5 Lite for Rhino and Revit Now Available appeared first on Architosh.

Newforma Konekt Teams

Their cloud-based Newforma Konekt platform now includes a Microsoft Teams Connector. This addition enables Teams conversations to be integrated directly into the Konekt project record, allowing firms to retain important communications without altering their existing collaboration workflows.

As more and more AEC organizations use Microsoft Teams as their default workspace for fast-moving project coordination, important decisions, clarifications, and issue resolution increasingly take place in this application channel.

Newforma Konekt gains new Microsoft Teams Connector integration.

The Konekt Teams Connector addresses this reality by automatically syncing public and shared Teams channels with their corresponding projects in Newforma Konekt. Messages, replies, reactions, and files are captured as part of the project record, giving firms a more complete, searchable, and durable history of project communication.

“Project teams should be able to work in the tools that help them move quickly without sacrificing the integrity of the project record,” said Carl Veillette, CPO at Newforma. “With the Microsoft Teams connector for Newforma Konekt, firms can capture the conversations where decisions happen while strengthening documentation, reducing risk and improving project continuity. Because when a question comes up later, it’s not enough to say a decision was made; you need to prove it. This integration captures what was decided in Teams, who was involved, when it happened.”

Beyond Teams Alone

One of the key advantages of the Teams Connector solution is its ability to preserve the Teams communication history beyond what is typically available in Microsoft Teams. Once a channel is connected, Newforma Konekt preserves the current version and previous versions with timestamps.

When a message is deleted in Teams, the deleted message remains in the Newforma Konekt record and is clearly identified as deleted. The integration also preserves thread structures, replies, reactions, and attached files, creating a more complete audit trail for firms managing compliance and contractual obligations and requirements, including project closeout and potential disputes.

“Construction communication is becoming increasingly fragmented,” added Peter Cannone, CEO of Newforma. “Instead of forcing every stakeholder into one tool, firms need to connect the tools teams already use and automatically bring the right information into a complete, reliable project record. That is core to what Newforma does: connecting people to the information they need, regardless of where it lives.”

For more info, go here.

The post Newforma Konekt gains new Microsoft Teams Connector appeared first on Architosh.

All of these firms have hundreds of employees and hundreds of software developers across numerous teams supporting a multitude of AEC industry digital tools. And Chaos, like those others just mentioned, also has professionals focused on expanding their firm through mergers and acquisitions. Everyone knows Autodesk regularly buys small firms, but do not be surprised to see all four of these companies, including Chaos, continue to acquire small tech companies, expand their product offerings, and drive synergies across their growing family of digital tools.

Chaos at AIA26

Chaos at AIA San Diego showcased their AEC industry visualization software solutions, as well as tools they have acquired over the past few years that are not visualization tools. These include tools like Chaos Glyph, a Revit plugin that automates and standardizes documentation tasks such as view and sheet creation, tagging, dimensions, and more. Chaos also has Morphis and Helix, which are non-visualization tools.

Watching a demo of Chaos Veras in action at AIA26.

Still, the story for Chaos at AIA26 was primarily focused on visualization, as that is what the company is known for.

Enscape

While Chaos’ most famous product is the legendary V-Ray renderer, the software firm based out of Germany is increasingly more well-known to architects for Enscape, its real-time, interactive renderer that works with literally every major BIM and 3D software platform. Enscape version 4.18, launched in May, is fully supportive of Autodesk Revit 2027, SketchUp 2026, Archicad 29 and Vectorworks 2026. There is also a new Chaos Envision live link so you can execute a one-click handoff from Enscape directly to Chaos Envision.

Another really interesting Enscape development is that the 2GB scene size limitation is removed. Enscape can now handle massive, complex project data without experiencing crashes. AI advancements are also visible to booth attendees looking at the latest, including AI material generation via AI inside the Enscape Material Editor via Chaos Cosmos. And users can upscale low-resolution images using Chaos AI Upscaler, and Architosh has already written about Veras AI integration across its product line before here.

V-Ray

Updates for Chaos’ most advanced renderer streamed out between June and July of this year, depending on the host application. V-Ray is still a dominant force—if not the dominant force—in archviz studios and agencies worldwide. V-Ray 7 was officially released in late June, after the AIA26 event in San Diego. And since then, there have been four updates. You can read our full report on V-Ray 7 Update 4 over here.

Veras is now fully integrated into all Enscape, V-Ray, and Corona renderer solutions.

Some notable highlights include GPU Caustics, which are now rendered on the GPU as an option. V-Ray Profiler analyzes your scene for what parts of the scene are taking the longest to render, compares the performance of different settings, and figures out the best settings for your scene. There is also Gaussian Splats support and more.

Corona 

Chaos Corona 15 was released back in late May. A big new change involved the Veras AI engine embedded for free in all Corona subscription tiers. You can push a render frame from Corona directly to Veras to generate dozens of material variations, swap seasons, and create short animations on the fly. Global illumination (GI) has been improved for Corona’s Gaussian Splats support. Additionally, there are new Glint Layers in Corona’s physical materials editor to create accurate metallic flakes, sand sparkle, and snow glints.

The Chaos booth at AIA26 had steady visitor flow checking out V-Ray, Enscape, Veras, and other key products.

MORE: Enscape, V-Ray, and Corona Get Veras AI Integration

New cloud streaming support allows clients to interactively walk through full 3D viewports or leave annotations on video animation sequences via a simple web link.

Veras

This year, Chaos integrated Veras into Enscape, V-Ray, and Corona renderers. Furthermore, our AIA25 Architosh BEST of SHOW winner in the Visualization Category and the Economics Prize award also integrated Google Nano Banana Pro with improved geometry fidelity, material realism, and lighting accuracy.

Working alongside a range of integrated Chaos products, Veras 4.0 also introduced brief animations from still images and can construct multiple perspectives from an initial view without the need to rebuild geometry. We were equally impressed with its ability to work from 2D drawings along with sketches to fashion compelling, polished 3D renderings and animations. We acknowledged that accelerating early-stage visualization with Veras is a force multiplier.

Other Show Reports

AIA26: Expo Show Report 1 — Autodesk

AIA26: Expo Show Report 2 — Nemetschek Group

AIA26: Expo Show Report 3 — Trimble and SketchUp

AIA26: Expo Show Report 4 — Chaos 

AIA26: Expo Show Report 5 — neoBIM, and other AI apps

AIA26: Expo Show Report 6 — xFigura, CODii, others

AIA26: Expo Show Report 7 — Layer, Arcol, Egnyte and more…

The post AIA26: Expo Show Floor Report 4—Chaos appeared first on Architosh.

V-Ray 7 Update 4

This update has been rolling out incrementally across various deployment options, from Maya to Houdini, the latter coming out on 13 July 2026.

Overall, this update centers around deep AI integration, real-time viewport ray tracing, and smarter asset handling.

AI Ideation and Material Creation

The Veras AI architectural engine is now natively embedded directly into the V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFP) and host applications. This lets users use text prompts to test out their design and visualization ideas or material alterations.

Chaos V-Ray 7 Update 4 includes Vantage integration in the viewport. (see text below).

V-Ray also introduced machine learning tools that automatically analyze a single 2D reference image to generate fully textured, physically accurate PBR materials with proper displacement and scattering.

Real-Time Viewport Upgrades

For users with active Chaos Vantage subscription licenses, V-Ray users can now leverage Vantage in the viewport. You can now toggle 100% ray-traced, final-frame-quality real-time rendering directly within your core software viewport (like Maya, 3ds Max, etc.) without opening an external window. All geometry adjustments, light shifts, and material updates synchronize instantly.

Advanced Visuals and Camera Controls

Exterior renders can now leverage the new VRayParallaxTex system, delivering parallax interiors. This simulates deep, believable 3D interior rooms behind windows using lightweight 2D textures, removing the need to model complex interior geometry. Quick caustics and 3D Gaussian Splats that can be dynamically relit via V-Ray scene lights are also added.

New object-based autofocus is also added in this update, as well as per-camera visibility lists. This means, on a per-camera basis, you can exclude specific geometry from being visible.

V-Ray 7 is available for numerous host applications, including: Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Maxon Cinema 4D, Houdini, Blender, SketchUp, Autodesk Revit, and Rhino 3D. To learn more about V-Ray for AEC, visit here.

The post Looking at Chaos V-Ray 7 Update 4 appeared first on Architosh.

Mighty SketchUp

One thing that folks in the architecture world may not be aware of is just how prevalent SketchUp is in the big-contractor construction world. SketchUp is regularly used by major general contractors such as Turner Construction and Taisei Corporation in Japan. Turner uses SketchUp as a 5D VDC tool, for example. The point is that SketchUp has a very large market presence in the construction phase of buildings. And it also has a very large role in the design phases of buildings, used by millions of designers, architects, and interior professionals around the world.

But what about the middle phase?

SketchUp as BIM

This was the question we asked Trimble this year. Will they ever begin to address the middle phase of the work?

The short answer we got is yes. How SketchUp moves in that direction is in the details, and the company is approaching more of that middle workflow phase by deepening its core modeling capabilities, strengthening its SketchUp to Revit workflows, and making improvements with IFC.

The Trimble SketchUp booth at AIA26 was busy showcasing various aspects of SketchUp and Trimble Connect.

Architosh was fortunate to get a preview look at upcoming SketchUp technologies, and while we can’t write about these in any amount of detail, we can summarize a little about what we saw. In general, when we think about SketchUp having this very strong utilization in the early phases of design whilst also having a strong hold on the big general contractor firms, we know that Trimble and its SketchUp team realize that Autodesk Revit holds a very strong grip on the documentation phase within the BIM workflow. Hence, in recent releases, we have seen the SketchUp-to-Revit workflow strengthen. Users should expect that trend to continue.

MORE: AIA26: Architosh 12th ‘BEST of SHOW’ honors for digital technologies at AIA San Diego

A stronger SketchUp-to-Revit workflow isn’t just beneficial to architects; those same large general contractors working with 4D-5D processes utilizing SketchUp and Trimble Connect also benefit from tighter integrations between these two popular AEC applications.

Another future coming to SketchUp will be modeling improvements of a rather larger nature than the company tends to deliver. Without letting the cat out of the bag, we can at least say that we were quite excited and impressed by what the SketchUp team is doing in this domain. For years, SketchUp has been working on speeding up rendering and visualization workflows, but speeding up modeling workflows has fully begun and will surely continue. Some of this will deploy agentic AI (like the Claude integration), and some of it will just be more powerful, parametric-like (or based) modeling updates.

A SketchUp professional talking to an AIA expo attendee about the latest new features in SketchUp 2026.2.

As SketchUp gains more modeling powers in the future, it will mean that—coupled with LayOut advancements—users will be able to do even more all within the program. At the same time, upcoming new features will deepen the value creation in SketchUp-to-Revit workflows in both the front-end and the back-end of the AEC process.

Cloud Collaboration at Trimble

Another view on SketchUp’s journey in the AEC industry and its relationship to BIM workflows is the ongoing transformation toward making SketchUp a multiplayer medium. The release in 2026 has turned SketchUp into a true multiplayer collaboration platform complete with real-time cursor tracking (you can see the live movements of your collaborators’ cursor inside the 3D space, color-coded by user), live camera follow, in-app geometry commenting, and public and private sharing links. As for live camera follow, what that means is a host can force all viewers to look through their exact perspective, or you can follow a colleague’s camera as they orbit a model or scene.

The multiplayer capabilities function once a SketchUp user has invited colleagues to view the model on Trimble Connect, Trimble’s cloud-based collaboration platform. Therefore, Trimble Connect serves as the engine and Common Data Environment (CDE) for the collaboration features, storing the model as well as the multiplayer comments. Connect provides the live stream data for your collaboration session as well as the granular permissions for collaborators.

Analysis Hub

We have been talking about SketchUp 2026 since its first iteration features last fall. The multiplayer technology and multi-user collaboration features were part of the 7 October 2025 release of SketchUp 2026. The latest release is actually SketchUp 2026.2 and brought with it the new building performance and analytical data tools in the new Analysis Hub.

A view of the new Analysis Hub in SketchUp 2026.2.

Analysis Hub is an entirely separate dedicated environment aimed at helping designers study daylight, shadow, and environmental building performance data directly inside of the design workspace. Part of Analysis Hub has SketchUp Labs tools, but one key official feature is Advanced Shadows. This natively supports interior shadow mapping by calculating sun penetration through active section planes. The Labs features include Daylight Factor, Annual Illuminance, and Underlit and Overlit Metrics.

The Analysis Hub features are powered by Trimble’s cloud simulation stack and heavily utilize Sefaira technology owned by Trimble.

Closing Thoughts

Clearly, this year the biggest news about SketchUp is the Claude AI integration, which moved the app into the early round of CAD industry tools connected to agentic AI capabilities. Architosh has already awarded SketchUp an AIA26 Architosh BEST of SHOW honor for digital technologies at AIA San Diego under the Emergent Technologies category. Yes, agentic AI is the most pivotal new emerging technology in 2026, beginning to impact CAD, BIM, and 3D applications as well as other types of applications serving the AEC industry. Being able to use agentic AI to model elements for you is quite transformative even in this very nascent stage of AI development.

But the glossiness of AI transformation can obscure (and perhaps has) SketchUp’s other meaningful evolution related to BIM and collaborative workflows. The multiplayer capabilities are strictly speaking common to the definition of BIM 2.0 technologies. Snaptrude has them; Arcol has them, and so do other new BIM 2.0 apps. So what does that make SketchUp now that it has this multiplayer technology as well since last fall?

We’ll leave you with that question. You can learn more about SketchUp here and here.

Other Show Reports

AIA26: Expo Show Report 1 — Autodesk

AIA26: Expo Show Report 2 — Nemetschek Group

AIA26: Expo Show Report 3 — Trimble and SketchUp

AIA26: Expo Show Report 4 — Chaos 

AIA26: Expo Show Report 5 — neoBIM, and other AI apps

AIA26: Expo Show Report 6 — xFigura, CODii, others

AIA26: Expo Show Report 7 — Layer, Arcol, Egnyte and more…

The post AIA26: Expo Show Floor Report 3 — Trimble and SketchUp appeared first on Architosh.

Considered by this publication to be among the top three BIM solutions in the world for architecture, based on global market share, total users, significance of their users (several Pritzker Prize-winning architects among users, product and technological innovation, and industry software awards, Vectorworks Architect is quite popular with design-forward practices as well as small-to-mid-sized architecture firms.

The resurgence of Mac computers in AEC, driven by Apple Silicon’s industry-leading performance (see, Architosh: “End of an Era: How Silicon Will Decide BIM’s Future,” 24 December 2025) means Mac-native software like Vectorworks is likely to gain a boost moving forward. Industry accolades clearly help the cause as well.

A+ Popular Choice Award

Presented by Architizer, the A+ Product Awards honor innovation in the building industry and the technologies shaping the future of architecture and interior design. With over 30 categories, the program recognizes tools and materials that help design professionals enhance creativity, efficiency, and transform the built environment. Winners are chosen by a distinguished jury of over 100 industry leaders and design visionaries worldwide, along with votes from the global architecture and design community.

Vectorworks Architect 2026 wins another Architizer A+ award.

“Being selected as the Popular Choice winner by the Architizer community is especially meaningful because it reflects the trust architects and designers place in Vectorworks to power their everyday work,” said Vectorworks Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Powell. “With our latest release, we’ve doubled down on smarter workflows, better performance, and more intuitive tools so designers can move seamlessly from concept to completion while knowing their voices are helping shape the future of our software.”

Vectorworks Architect 2026, this year, boasted advanced new depth cueing, intuitive worksheet slicing, a sustainability dashboard for carbon calculations, and improved modeling tools.

To learn more about Vectorworks, go here.

The post Vectorworks Architect 2026 Wins Architizer A+ Popular Choice Award appeared first on Architosh.

The first benefit is that the Group has a large visual presence on the show floor. The second benefit is that booth visitors get a better understanding of sister brands they may not be aware of. Take, for instance, an architect who is an Autodesk Revit user and also a Bluebeam user. If this architect visited the Bluebeam stations inside the large Nemetschek booth, they could discover that Maxon this year introduced its real-time Redshift rendering solution for Autodesk Revit. (see, Architosh, “AIA26: Maxon’s new Redshift for Revit and More,” 17 June 2026 )

The only real downside we see from having a good half dozen AEC brands inside one super-sized booth is that individual BIM authoring companies Archicad and Vectorworks have less space and less of a visual impact on the show floor. Typically, at AIA National, these two companies had their own full-sized booths with perhaps a dozen staff members and that many computer demo stations, plus a tiny booth theater. The Nemetschek booth gives out free drinks, which is a clever idea to bring showgoers into their orbit.

Nemetschek’s Group Strategies

This year, the Nemetschek Group and its subsidiary, Graphisoft, put considerable effort into communicating what they call the Graphisoft Design Intelligence strategy. We covered this in a separate report (see, Architosh: “Graphisoft Advances Design Intelligence Strategy,” 15 June 2026.)

Graphisoft was sharing their Design Intelligence Strategy at AIA26 inside of a session as well as in their booth to the press and other parties.

As we noted in the above report, the Group’s strategy is to link together Graphisoft and other Nemetschek Group tools within an open BIM model framework supporting wide data exchange via both APIs, MCPs, and native BIM connectors. This last part pertains to the Group’s BIM authoring environments, geometry engines, and file formats.

Native BIM Connectors

Theoretically, today it means an Archicad user could utilize Vectorworks Landmark’s excellent terrain modeling capabilities and bring that site into an Archicad project. This would mean Archicad could read (natively) a Vectorworks file format. Likewise, a theater project done in Archicad could be pushed to Vectorworks Spotlight, a dedicated CAD/BIM platform focused on performance space design. With native BIM connectors, Allplan users in Germany could read in both Archicad and Vectorworks BIM models natively. All these programs have proprietary file formats, but it likely doesn’t make sense to keep them proprietary within the Group. On the contrary, native BIM connectors should work better than IFC at moving BIM models around between programs.

Native AEC Platform Connections is a focus area for better industry coordination. That’s in the yellow box above. This will start with Nemetschek’s tools first, but through strategic partnerships like the existing one Nemetschek has with Autodesk, it could extend to other platforms.

Over a year ago, Architosh had a discussion with Sunil Pandita, Chief Division Officer, Planning & Design and Digital Twin Business Unit, Nemetschek Group, who told Architosh that the Group was investigating whether each of the BIM authoring environments could share a common geometry modeling foundation. Building native BIM connectors, while complex, is tremendously easier.

Geometry Engines

Trying to get all three BIM tools on the same geometry foundation would require massive rework and recoding for either Archicad, Allplan, or Vectorworks, depending on which direction they tried to unify around. Both Vectorworks and Allplan use Parasolids, while Allplan still has some geometry creation done via its own geometry engine, so it’s a hybrid. Meanwhile, Archicad doesn’t use any third-party geometry engine, instead relying on a Graphisoft-coded, architecture-focused GDL-based geometry environment. Among the three, Vectorworks and Allplan are closest, while Archicad’s geometry engine is honed for the specifics of architecture.

With this degree of variability in all three tools, only native BIM connectors make sense to pursue, and the sooner they achieve this capability, the stronger the Nemetschek Group can function and compete in the open market.

The Open Approach

A hallmark of Open Intelligence Strategy is the open approach to the industry. Notice in the middle of the diagram below that Native BIM Data Connectors allow data to pass between not just Nemetschek tools but also include SketchUp.

The Open Approach to the industry’s collaboration challenges begins with open APIs and no lock-in technologies. Nemetschek and Graphisoft are aiming to develop a cloud-based, AI-centric open collaboration platform to rival the more closed-oriented Autodesk Forma ecosystem.

MCP and AI agents will form a backbone of an open collaboration platform along with existing pre-AI-era collaboration connectivity technologies like IFC, BCF, and more. This will enable the synchronization of data between 2nd and 3rd party clouds, such as between Bluebeam Cloud and Autodesk Forma or between Solibri and Autodesk Forma.

As part of the announcements, open industry collaboration between Autodesk and Nemetschek Group now includes an Archicad—Autodesk Forma Connection, built on the backbone of a previous agreement. Users can upload an Archicad 3D view or full model directly as an Autodesk Forma Data Exchange, and the geometry becomes immediately accessible as reference data inside programs like Revit. And there is Publisher Set syncing between Archicad and the cloud-hosted Autodesk Forma Data Management (previously ACC).

While Archicad now has compatibility with Autodesk Forma Data Management to meet Forma-based project requirements, the Nemetschek Group is also endeavoring to develop and release in 2027 its own cloud-based early design stage ecosystem similar to Forma Site Design, Forma Building Design, and Forma Carbon Insights. This was previously known as Project Aurora, but the cloud platform and solution has a much more exciting new name, Graphisoft tells us.

Other Nemetschek Brands

Maxon

Also on display inside the giant Nemetschek Group booth were market leaders like Bluebeam, Vectorworks, Solibri, and Maxon. Maxon was showcasing its new Redshift for Revit rendering solution as well as a version for Archicad and its previously released version for Vectorworks.

As noted in our previous report, Redshift’s raytracing technology is distinguished for its rendering quality and speed, and the ability to have another high-quality real-time design visualization technology for your design environment beyond the existing options is a big win for the industry. Especially because users can push these finished render scenes with one click to Maxon’s acclaimed Cinema 4D animation environment for advanced studio work.

Maxon’s new AEC industry push continues with Redshift for Autodesk Revit and more.

And given the animation capabilities of AI tools like Chaos Veras, professional Archviz pros will need to develop more advanced, sophisticated offerings that a tool like Cinema 4D can deliver.

Vectorworks and Morpholio

Vectorworks is one of the Nemetschek Group’s star products, from both its market fit and positioning, its underlying technology stack, and its popularity and fame in architectural markets. From a fit-for-market angle, the Vectorworks product line addresses more than architecture with its Landmark product, without peer in the professional landscape architecture market. Meanwhile, it has a whole series of industry-leading products in the entertainment design space, which includes television and film production, which are increasingly becoming more digitized.

But for many architects, Vectorworks Architect is the go-to and must-have design platform. This year, the daughter company acquired Morpholio with its namesake iPad application. Architosh awarded this tool an AIA26 Architosh BEST of SHOW honor, where we said this about it:

Vectorworks with Morpholio rounds out the “sketch to BIM” product philosophy the United States-based CAD/BIM maker has been telling for years. And Vectorworks 2026 today stands as an exemplar of a codebase that has kept up with changing times, being the first in the Group to become Apple Silicon-native and offering its users incredible interface customization features.

Bluebeam

Bluebeam Max was prominently on display at AIA26 inside the Nemetschek booth. This product was also an AIA26 Architosh BEST of SHOW honoree product for its utilization of agentic AI and MCP connecting Anthropic’s Claude AI to Bluebeam Revu.

The latest Bluebeam Max technologies supercharge this mainstay in the building industry with multiple levels of AI power, including in-house-developed AI capabilities paired with its Firmus-AI-acquired AI capabilities. The latter technologies are on point this year, as several other AI-first companies have introduced the ability for AI to scan or ingest PDF-based drawings and review them for QA/QC purposes.

MORE: AIA26: Architosh 12th ‘BEST of SHOW’ honors for digital technologies at AIA San Diego

When it comes to the Nemetschek Group, Bluebeam is leading the Group with its shipment of agentic AI solutions powered by onboard MCP servers in Revu and connection with an AI orchestrator like Anthropic’s Claude. We are now wondering how other Nemetschek brands will move forward with AI technologies given the popularity of Anthropic’s Claude.

Solibri

During our time in the Nemetschek Group joint pavilion, Solibri presented on Accessibility Assurance: Automate ADA Compliance & Reduce Professional Liability. This presentation showcased how a rule-based checking engine in Solibri can flag ADA violations.

Regarding what is new with Solibri in 2026, the company has restructured its software delivery model and retired its standalone legacy products. Solibri Office, Solibri Site, and Solibri Anywhere have been phased out as standalone tools. In their place is a new tiered platform and single, scalable ecosystem grouped into five tier offerings: Solibri Starter, Essential, Advanced, Premium, and Security+.

Solibri in 2026 has an entirely restructured software delivery model that is a better fit for purpose in the current industry. Solutions address Building Lifecycle, BIM QA, IDS Workflows, and BIM validation for hyperscale and data center construction.

Solibri has also updated its solution to include IFC data support improvements, transparent 3D rendering for IFC spatial zones, a dark mode option, and automated sustainability compliance via a new carbon checker extension.

Solibri’s new product restructuring has kept its hybrid (desktop + cloud) model, resisting the all-cloud mandate that some in the industry believe is the future of AEC compute. Solibri CheckPoint (its all-cloud solution that was acquired) is actually phased out as a product, and some of its technology came into the Solibri cloud layer. Solibri Starter is just USD 99/year/user and is for individuals and small teams needing reliable model review before coordination begins. This is what Solibri calls “professional IFC model visual inspection.” From here, product capabilities and pricing scale up dramatically. Solibri Essential is for structured BIM coordination control and includes both IFC and Revit model federation. Solibri Advanced enables custom rule creation versus Essential’s predefined rule-based model checking. It also delivers quantity take-off and ecosystem integrations with other CDEs. Solibri Premium and Solibri Security+ scale further for asset portfolio-level governance and compliance and for totally secure offline operation for government and high-security structures. The US government is a major Solibri customer, for example.

Other Show Reports

AIA26: Expo Show Report 1 — Autodesk

AIA26: Expo Show Report 2 — Nemetschek Group

AIA26: Expo Show Report 3 — Trimble and SketchUp

AIA26: Expo Show Report 4 — Chaos 

AIA26: Expo Show Report 5 — neoBIM, and other AI apps

AIA26: Expo Show Report 6 — xFigura, CODii, others

AIA26: Expo Show Report 7 — Layer, Arcol, Egnyte and more…

The post AIA26: Expo Show Floor Report 2 — Nemetschek Group appeared first on Architosh.

Here is the way to think about how Autodesk is organizing its AEC products and services. They have them in three categories: Design, Simulate, and Manage. We are going to talk about what was shown or focused on at AIA26 in a moment, but briefly, products are organized like this:

• DESIGN — Forma Building Design, Revit, AutoCAD, and others
• SIMULATE — Forma Site Design, Forma Carbon Insights, and others
• MANAGE — Forma Data Management, Navisworks, and others

At AIA26 in San Diego, the business areas of Autodesk’s booth—based on our several visits to and by their booth—were focused on Forma Building Design, Forma Site Design, and other Forma-branded areas, including Forma Data Management, Forma Carbon Insights, Forma Design Collaboration, et cetera.

Meeting Autodesk at AIA26

Our primary visit to the Autodesk booth was to meet with Jesper Staahl, Senior Technical Marketing Manager at Autodesk, who was going to run us through Forma Building Design, including its newly launched schematic design model (LOD 200-300) and Revit integration.

MORE: Autodesk intros new Forma Building Design

Autodesk’s Forma Building Design is progressing at a reasonable pace. Jesper spent time reviewing the facade design capabilities that allow architects and designers to quickly and efficiently explore iterative facade design options. Despite being parametrically driven,  there is a fairly decent amount of plasticity and flexibility in the tool with respect to openings. And architects can also push and pull the building’s facade levels backward and forward. I asked if parts of the facade could be organized into groups (think base level, mid level, and upper levels), and Jesper quickly showed that capability.

Autodesk’s booth was clearly heavily visited at AIA26 San Diego. This was the first time at AIA that the new Forma rebranding and integration of products were on full display.

Another thing Forma Building Design can do with respect to facade design is to analyze your facade’s impact on the building design by taking that model into Forma Carbon Insights. Technically, you are not “pushing or pulling” geometry data between these two tools because they operate on a single, continuous cloud data thread. Once you begin looking at the impact of your design work—and especially your facade design work back in Forma Building Design—inside Forma Carbon Insights, you can explore and benchmark energy impacts. As an architect, you can see where facade decisions are costing you energy costs, and you can then balance trade-offs between geometry and orientations as they inform your building design.

To our eyes, the Forma Building Design area (station) was the hottest area within the Autodesk booth space. Lots of architects and designers were learning about this relatively new product offering that ties into Forma Site Design and other Forma cloud solutions.

Forma Carbon Insights (formerly Autodesk Insight) can also connect to Revit models and do the same kinds of things it does in Forma Building Design, giving architects the capability to refine design based on energy and carbon impacts even after the design work has moved from Forma Building Design to Revit. What has been described is what Autodesk refers to as connecting Design to Simulate.

As for Forma Site Design, this product is more similar to the original Spacemaker.AI tool Autodesk acquired and from which it is based. This is your early-stage design and analysis tool from Autodesk, and the one you use before jumping to Forma Building Design. Forma Site Design helps you with your site and building planning (test fitting), starting with GIS-level real-world coordinates and site context via native ArcGIS data and enterprise sign-in.

MORE: AIA26: Architosh 12th ‘BEST of SHOW’ honors for digital technologies at AIA San Diego

Environmental analysis for the impact on sites that buildings make and how contextual buildings impact new buildings, Forma Site Design (formally just Forma), shows you sun and shadow impacts, daylight potential, noise analysis, wind analysis, embodied carbon, and more. All of those technologies are why we have awarded Autodesk Forma our BEST of SHOW award in past AIA national conferences.

Forma Site Design also features Forma Board for organization and presentations. Forma Site Design also dovetails with other Forma-branded products and other Autodesk tools like Revit and Dynamo. Third-party sector leaders like McNeel’s Rhino 3D are also connected.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Autodesk’s global AEC “Forma” brand is probably one of the smartest things it has done recently. While it will take existing users some time to mentally switch from old names, the unification reflects Autodesk’s master AEC strategic product plans. Earlier in the year, the company implemented the rebranding integration with ACC, fully joining the Forma environment. Even BIM 360 is now known as Forma Design Collaboration. (see, Architosh: “Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) is now Autodesk Forma,” 31 Mar 2026).

BIM Collaborate Pro (formerly BIM 360) is now Forma Design Collaboration. This application runs in the cloud (web browser-based) and connects multidisciplinary teams, data, and workflows during the design phase of the project. It supports automated clash detection, issue tracking, simultaneous editing, timeline packages, and more.

Aside from seeing this unified Forma rebranding presented to the North American architectural industry for the first time, it seemed to us that Autodesk’s booth had even more energy than it typically has each year. Architects were flocking around the Forma Building Design station, the Forma Site Design station, and other Forma Data Management, Forma Build, and Forma Carbon Insights stations. These areas were the hottest areas of Autodesk’s booth, signaling perhaps that the US industry is beginning to grasp Autodesk’s AEC future direction. 

Other Show Reports

AIA26: Expo Show Report 1 — Autodesk

AIA26: Expo Show Report 2 — Nemetschek Group

AIA26: Expo Show Report 3 — Trimble and SketchUp

AIA26: Expo Show Report 4 — Chaos 

AIA26: Expo Show Report 5 — neoBIM, and other AI apps

AIA26: Expo Show Report 6 — xFigura, CODii, others

AIA26: Expo Show Report 7 — Layer, Arcol, Egnyte and more…

The post AIA26: Expo Show Floor Report 1 — Autodesk appeared first on Architosh.

Agentic and Agent-based AI

Over the last two years, AI technology at AIA24 and AIA25 has steadily matured, and we saw many AI solutions last year. However, this year, AI and automation were scaled up a notch. In particular, we are beginning to see Anthropic’s MCP (model context protocol) technology rolling out across product solutions and agentic AI technologies that orchestrate data and workflows. This is different than AI that simply finds information for you, whether about your application or data out on the internet.

Model Context Protocol

For clarity, Model Context Protocol (MCP) is closely tied to agentic AI, but the MCP standard is an infrastructure protocol, not an autonomous AI agent itself. Think of it as plumbing. In fact, the popular analogy for MCP is “USB-C for AI.” Tools that now support MCP are becoming numerous in AEC. Two key ones were awarded Architosh’s AIA26 BEST of SHOW honors yesterday. (see, Architosh: “AIA26: Architosh 12th ‘BEST of SHOW’ honors for digital technologies at AIA San Diego,” 22 June 2026)

MCP by itself doesn’t really do much. You need an AI architecture that can orchestrate the core software system and manage the AI’s state, controls, and logic flow. Such systems instruct the software on what step to take next. So we are seeing Anthropic’s Claude AI technology now connected to software systems like SketchUp and Bluebeam Max to do very useful kinds of things that normally take a considerable amount of time to do the old human-only way. Claude is used as a natural language user interface (NLUI) and can speak to the software and get work done.

SketchUp’s new Claude integration brings generative AI modeling to the popular 3D modeling platform.

In SketchUp’s case, it can create (model) 3D objects directly inside SketchUp. In Bluebeam Max’s case, Claude can produce Revu commands such as batch operations, batch search, highlight, and a whole lot more. Both of these tools were highlights of AIA26 San Diego this year.

Other solutions have chat-based palettes built directly into their interfaces. This is becoming table stakes for software in the age of AI. These solutions are often called “co-pilots” or “agent-driven UIs”. They don’t just answer questions about the software; the AI itself has an execution layer and can map natural-language intent directly into function-system operations. We discussed this intently in our recent feature on ARES 2026 software, where it was possible to talk your way into having the CAD and BIM software actually draw things for you, or create layers within your file, following your textual direction. (see, Architosh: “ARES 2027 Deep Dive: AI, Automation and BIM-to-DWG Workflows,” 5 May 2026). We also discussed this particular feature during an online event.

While CAD tools like ARES 2027 are nearly a full release cycle ahead of many CAD and BIM solutions in the industry in terms of this kind of AI capability, we are starting to see solutions like SketchUp, with its Claude integration, leverage AI automation to make work happen in a similar way. Basically, let AI drive the software and produce work for you.

So you may ask: what is the benefit of having AI drive the software in the same vein as having your Tesla drive itself?

The answer depends, but usually, if something is extremely repetitive, the AI can do it much faster. Or, if the task is quite complex and would require advanced skills in software you don’t have, the speed-up could be massive or even infinite, since you can’t actually do it at all. If you can’t model the Space Shuttle inside of AutoCAD or ARES, but you can use ARES’ AI tools to create it for you, the AI didn’t just save time; the AI made it possible for you.

Automation Matters Also

Not all the buzz in the AEC industry software involves artificial intelligence (AI). There are many ways general automation can occur without LLMs or agentic AI. With the new BIM 2.0 software tools, their data-centric workflows and API interconnections mean that data from tools like Arcol can stream directly into other solutions and data types via API linkages.

Arcol is showing its new integration of spreadsheets that can be bi-directionally synced with Excel files. This feature was highly requested by general construction and development companies so they could link building metrics with their own cost data.

As part of Arcol’s embrace of the construction industry (it is still focused on architects as well), the BIM 2.0 company added interconnections to spreadsheets (Excel) so that early-stage designs can be paired with cost data from large general contractors doing real estate development.

BIM 2.5?

We often write about BIM 2.0. But originally BIM 2.0 didn’t begin with AI in mind like we currently are thinking about AI. When firms like Spacemaker.AI (now Forma), Digital Bluefoam, TestFit, Arcol, and Snaptrude began their journey, it happened before the OpenAI explosion, and the public had no idea about such AI tools yet. But now that we are on the other side of this critical invention, what if someone built an AEC software ecosystem with agentic AI in its DNA from the ground up?

Newcomer (neoBIM), with its buildingOS system, is doing exactly that.

NeoBIM GmbH is a new German AEC software company aiming to reshape the industry with the industry’s first AI-native ground-up software ecosystem architecture. The company and its buildingOS system have several discrete tools so far, including a TestFit-like early-stage planning tool called Gen.

NeoBIM has a new AI-centric application system architecture for the complete building lifecycle, from early site test fits (shown above) to post-occupancy digital twins. The German software firm’s founder is Moritz Luck, who was co-founder and GEO of Enscape and is also the founding partner of SilverScale Capital. Their demonstrations at AIA26 were impressive, and so NeoBIM GmbH is definitely a company on our radar this year, and we look forward to learning more about what they are doing.

The post AIA26: AI and Automation Shine in San Diego—Some Highlights appeared first on Architosh.