The great data heist: How the AEC industry lost control of its most valuable asset

While the world transformed around us, AEC stood still.

As manufacturing revolutionized with lean principles, as retail reimagined itself through customer analytics, and as finance rebuilt on algorithmic trading, construction productivity flatlined.

The numbers are damning: over two decades, the broader economy's productivity grew five times faster than construction. We didn't just fall behind; we were left in the dust.

The BIM paradox: Progress as prison

Twenty years ago, Building Information Modeling (BIM) promised to be our salvation.

Finally, we could capture the complexity of our projects in rich, intelligent models. We invested billions in software licenses, training, plug-ins, and workflows. We filled hard drives—and then clouds—with detailed 3D representations of every project we touched.

But here's the cruel irony: BIM didn't liberate our knowledge. It imprisoned it.

Every model became a data silo. Every project became an island. As our industry’s digital output exploded, the collective intelligence of two decades - the hard-won lessons about what works, what fails, what costs too much, what delights clients - grew locked away behind proprietary file formats.

In short, as we created the most comprehensive digital record of the built environment in human history, it became practically inaccessible to the very people who spent millions of hours creating it.

The expertise emergency

Today, over 90% of AEC organizations report that talent shortages are strangling their growth. And now, the seasoned professionals who carry decades of project wisdom in their heads are retiring faster than we can replace them.

Meanwhile, the junior talent we desperately need can't access the institutional knowledge trapped in our digital archives in any coherent way.

We're hemorrhaging expertise at the exact moment we need it most.

In an industry where good judgment comes from experience - and experience comes from decades of both triumphs and getting our heads kicked in on job sites - we've created a system that prevents the next generation from learning from our collective past. We're forcing them to repeat our mistakes because they can't access our lessons.

The path forward: Harnessing data as a strategic asset

Other industries figured out how to unlock the value of their organization’s data decades ago.

Amazon's recommendation engine drives 35% of its sales by predicting what you'll buy before you know it yourself. In logistics, FedEx's algorithms route 15 million packages daily, saving millions in fuel costs through micro-optimizations. These industries have transformed themselves through building flexible, vendor-agnostic data architectures that let them connect information from any source, analyze it with any tool, and deploy it wherever it creates value.

It's time for AEC to grow up.

Your models represent thousands of hours of human expertise and millions of dollars of project knowledge. That's not software data - that's your firm's intellectual property, your competitive advantage, your institutional memory.

And as AI transforms every industry around us, the value of that data increases every day.

On any given project, an average of 42 external collaborators generate torrents of data across your projects, from a myriad of sources. Every design iteration, every specification change, every regulatory requirement carries the DNA of decision-making that could revolutionize how you deliver built environments. Yet today, we treat this goldmine like digital paperwork, filing it away instead of unleashing its power.

As we work on connecting cost data to design models, Amazon is already predicting what you'll buy tomorrow. While we're managing assets in spreadsheets, FedEx is routing packages with surgical precision. We need data systems that think, not just store. You deserve data infrastructure that works as hard as you do.

What if AEC intelligence worked like this?

• Your clients see real-time project dashboards that make progress transparent, predictable, and trustworthy. You're not just a service provider, you're the partner who delivers confidence within an uncertain industry.
• You design that third healthcare facility in half the time because your system remembers every client requirement, every successful solution, and every lesson learned. Intelligence compounds across projects instead of starting from zero.
• You analyze 100 project opportunities, and your data instantly surfaces the 10% that will be profitable. Not just feasible, profitable. And you bid with evidence, not guesswork.

Stop managing data. Start commanding it. In an increasingly competitive market, your edge isn’t software. It’s the accumulated intelligence of your own work and the ability to put it to use.

Three non-negotiable principles for realizing better data

As the AEC industry grapples with increasing project complexity and the promise of AI transformation, most organizations find their data trapped in silos or simply too disorganized to deliver value.

At Speckle, these three principles drive everything we build and represent the standards we believe you should demand from every technology provider you rely on:

1. Democratized Data Access: Your project data should be easily accessible to everyone who can leverage it to make better decisions, not hidden behind restrictive licenses or locked in proprietary formats. This means establishing appropriate access levels so critical information reaches the right stakeholders at the right time, like notifying cost estimators about design changes and ensuring clients can view cost progress tracking in real-time.
2. Tool Independence: Your data must exist independently of any single application, preserving your freedom to choose the best tools for each job without vendor lock-in. When your structural analysis reveals issues, you need the ability to seamlessly move that data to visualization software, cost estimation tools, or emerging AI platforms - without costly exports, reformatting, or data loss.
3. Actionable Intelligence: Your data must be organized and queryable, ready to solve both your biggest strategic challenges and your most mundane productivity problems. While 70% of businesses say AI is critical to their success, only 13% are actually ready to leverage it to full potential. Raw data sitting idle in disconnected systems delivers zero value.

These principles aren't just technical requirements—they're business imperatives that determine whether your data becomes a strategic asset or an expensive liability.

The line in the sand

It’s time to put your data to work. Siloed data is dead data. The AEC industry stands at a crossroads.

We can continue watching our productivity stagnate, or we can start putting our most valuable untapped resource to work. We can free our design data from today’s vendor-enforced siloes and focus on work that matters. We can start building dashboards that show us cost progress in real-time, rather than fighting with Power BI and exporting PDF reports.

The choice is simple: Transform your data, or sit back and watch others transform the industry.

But how? How do you actually break free from two decades of trapped data? How do you unlock value from data that's scattered across dozens of applications and buried in proprietary formats?

The solution requires a fundamental rethink of how design and project intelligence flows through your organization. You need infrastructure that treats data as a strategic asset and is designed to grow with your business, rather than trap it inside vendor ecosystems.

Across the industry, forward-thinking firms are already making this choice. They're refusing to accept that their most valuable asset - decades of project intelligence - should remain locked away.

Speckle: Who we are

This is exactly the fight Speckle has been waging alongside our customers.

Speckle is the open data layer for AEC - and we're just getting started. For five years, we've been obsessed with one mission: getting your design data out of disconnected tools and making it work for you, not against you.

We've now built the most agnostic, scalable data architecture in AEC, making it ridiculously easy for every member of your team to access the intelligence trapped in your models and leverage it to make better decisions.

We believe in a simple truth: you should own your data and unlock every gram of value it can deliver to your business. We're not just building better software—we're delivering fundamental data freedom.

Other platforms stitch silos together with fragile wrappers. Speckle is different. Universality is not an afterthought or a rebuild; it is our foundation. Every tool, every workflow, every collaborator connects through the same core model.

Once that data is unlocked and normalised in our data layer, Speckle becomes your operational co-pilot. There is critical intent behind every data exchange. Our mission is to enable, clarify, and capture these feedback cycles to either help you reach better outcomes or fail more quickly (while learning from it).

Decisions and outcomes that are not observable will not become part of your institutional memory and cannot be harnessed to inform AI. That’s precisely what Speckle captures for you.

We're teaming up with you to tackle the incumbents and reroute data, intelligence, and profit back to the designers, engineers, and builders.

Reclaim your AEC data and put it to work with Speckle

Speckle: What we're building

The future of AEC is putting your data to work by making it easy to Access, Analyze and Automate your information. Speckle operationalizes your data to be AI-ready - turning information into intelligence across every level of your organization.

What’s worse than unstructured data? Out-of-date data. That’s why, once data flows through Speckle, it is always current and consistently structured. Speckle normalises information while respecting the format it came from, creating a common language you can interpret with our tools, your own workflows, or to power AI.

And that is enough to finally empower teams to do what they are best at and begin putting the data to work: guiding better decisions, automating tired processes, and delivering better experiences for clients.

From junior designers iterating on building designs to executive directors making critical project decisions, valuable information flows at every level. Speckle makes that intelligence accessible to each person - and agent - in ways that work intuitively for better decision-making.

Our platform delivers value through four key pillars:

• Access - Break the data bottleneck. Getting the data out of our design authoring applications shouldn’t be that hard, but it is. Speckle is your universal translator, pulling data from any source and making it instantly shareable across teams, tools, and stakeholders. Information locked in silos is information wasted.
• Analyze - Turn data into decisions. Real-time dashboards that connect design changes to cost impacts, schedule implications, and performance metrics. Your project data becomes a living intelligence system that answers questions before you know how to ask them. Decisions made on stale or hidden data are just guesswork.
• Automate - Eliminate the busywork. Stop manually checking clash reports, updating spreadsheets, and chasing down version conflicts. Let software handle the repetitive tasks while your talent focuses on the creative problem-solving that clients actually pay for. Every minute spent on data housekeeping is a minute not spent delivering value.
• AI-ready - Turn your data into a competitive moat. We keep information current and consistent, not only the drawings and models actively being worked on today, but also the vault of expertise from past projects. Speckle makes that accumulated knowledge usable, turning scattered files into a structured foundation that can be applied to everyday decisions or scaled into training fuel for tomorrow’s AI. This is not bureaucracy or box-ticking; it is our history of work finally paying compound interest. While competitors struggle with data quality issues, you're already deploying models that drive tangible business outcomes.

The invitation

Our customers are already moving fast.

We're helping organizations across the project lifecycle reclaim data agency - from global design firms tackling generational megaprojects to 50-person contractors adapting to constant BIM model changes from architects. We deliver everything through customizable frameworks because we know every company, client, project, office, and workflow demands a unique approach.

The paradigm is shifting. While most digital initiatives in AEC stumble and stall, firms working with Speckle are building something different: an open data foundation that actually delivers on its promises.

When you're ready to activate your data advantage and position your firm as a leader in the shift toward more intelligent ways of working, we’re here to accelerate your journey.

In an industry where most digital initiatives stall, you'll be able to point to your firm's open data layer and say with confidence: This one works. This one delivers.