BIM BOP 2026: We've Come a Long Way

WHERE

ONLINE (not being recorded). Free!

WHEN

Friday, July 10,  2026
Session 1 – Lectures (8:50 am – 10:30 am PDT)

Session 2 – Lectures (10:55 am – 12:30 pm PDT)

Session 3 – BIM BOPs (12:55 pm – 2:10 pm PDT)

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

https://usc.zoom.us/meeting/register/q83h6RGLTD-Wa1xcjPF5Hg

SPEAKERS

Lecturers (30 minutes) and BIM BOPPers (5 minutes) are listed alphabetically by last name. This list might change. Updates will be posted when known.

Yunnan Allen, HDR

LECTURE:  From Automation to Judgment: Can AI Make Us Better Thinkers?

AI is not the first general-purpose technology powerful enough to reshape how we operate as a society. At the turn of the 20th century, the internal combustion engine did exactly that. Some applications simply replaced human effort, like motorized roller skates. Others improved existing methods, like the automobile. And a few unlocked entirely new possibilities, like sustained, controlled flight.

Today, AI is putting that kind of power in our hands, along with the responsibility to choose how we apply it. We can use it to simply replace human effort, to produce more, faster. We can build powerful, intelligent libraries. But what’s something fundamentally new, something that was impossible before? What if AI became our infrastructure for developing judgment, actively helping us test, refine, and strengthen how we think? What if our reasoning could be made visible, challenged, improved, and become cumulative intelligence? This talk explores a series of case studies: early experiments in using AI not just to generate outcomes, but to support how designers think, decide, and learn.

Aaron Anderson, Luh Tech

BIM BOP:  After the AI Rush: VDC as a Real-Time Decision Layer

AI is getting the attention, but the deeper shift in construction may be what happens after the hype: turning VDC into a live decision environment. This talk explores how streaming project data—geometry, field conditions, labor, cost, schedule, and authority—can help construction move from fragmented contracts toward something closer to a production system. The front end may look like self-driving car technology; the back end is an economic argument about trust, incentives, and real-time coordination.iption

Scott Davidson, Robert McNeel & Associates

LECTURE:  BIM Odyssey: What follows the post monolythic world

Description

Scott Davis, Autodesk

BIM BOP:  Beyond Modeling: AI and the Future of Building Content

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how designers create, evaluate, and communicate ideas. This BIM BOP explores how Autodesk is enabling the next generation of AI-powered design tools, including technologies that can generate 3D content from text, sketches, images, and other inputs. We'll look beyond today's BIM workflows and discuss what these advances could mean for architects, engineers, and BIM professionals as the industry shifts from manually creating content to directing intelligent design systems.

Jed Donaldson, Johnson Fain

LECTURE:  Defining Architecture: Practicing the Art of Architecture During the Information Age

Architects have evolved from Master Builders to modern day practitioners who work with digitally connected, consultant driven, and AI influenced design processes. A renewed definition of Architecture is the contemporary understanding of the delivery of poetics, spatial awareness, and craft, as well as the architect’s responsibility to be the bridge between the physical built environment and the developing digital datascape.

Altaf Ganihar, Snaptrude

BIM BOP:  BIM Promised a Connected Ecosystem. We Got a Filing Cabinet.

BIM promised a connected ecosystem. The industry got a filing cabinet of disconnected files held together by people. That gap matters now, because AI bolted onto disconnected tools just automates the chaos, and generic AI only draws generic buildings. The real question for any firm is whether AI can work in your standards, your templates, your existing Revit library. When the model, the data, and the drawings stay fused, a brief and a real site become a coordinated LOD 300 model in about a day, not a quarter, with the designer in control. The result isn't a generic demo. It's a building that looks like your office made it.

Clifton Harness, TestFit

BIM BOP:  Making a generic room configurator with AI

Learn a quick way to leverage asymmetrical warfare using simple logic, data structures, and no code to create an amazing workflow.

Sam Keville, HDR

BIM BOP:  What’s VDC?

Get your seat at the table of for most important 3 letter word since BIM.

Yao Lin, Santec

BIM BOP:  Hand drawing isn't dead In a BIM world

Modeling gets you the form but to sharpen the edges the hand can get to the finer construction details. 

Todd Lukesh

BIM BOP:  What If Buildings Could Prevent Their Own "Seizures"?

A physics-based building digital twin continuously monitors and optimizes its assets—preventing its own "seizures" in the form of downtime, energy waste, equipment failures, and operational disruptions through IoT, BMS, AI, and increasingly, neuromorphic computing that mimics the brain's ability to sense, learn, and adapt in real time. Similarly, a human digital twin continuously monitors and optimizes human health, predicting and preventing neurological or physiological disruptions before they occur. Different assets—buildings and humans—but the same goal: sense early, learn continuously, intervene proactively, and optimize performance, resilience, and wellbeing.

Nathan Miller, Proving Ground

BIM BOP:  Three fallacies...and a dash of the truth

Digital strategies, product pitches, and media hype are full of appeals to newness, scale, and survival. This short talk will dissect popular logical fallacies underpinning the discourse of digital transformation and propose alternative areas of strategic focus. Is it really "adapt or die"?

Nuri Miller, Dassault Systèmes

BIM BOP:  Building Smarter with AI and Virtual Twins to Reshape Construction Productivity

The construction industry faces compounding pressures of stagnant productivity, a shrinking skilled workforce, and ever-more-complex projects. Virtual Twins with AI-driven companions are beginning to change the equation, focusing on capturing and reusing a firm's construction knowledge across projects, and maintaining a single thread of digital continuity from design through on-site execution that remains responsive to late-stage design changes.

Kimon Onuma, ONUMA Inc.

LECTURE:  Architects of Intelligence: Why the Intelligence Must Outlive the Application

As AI, BIM, and Digital Twins reshape the built environment, the challenge is no longer creating intelligent models; it is ensuring that intelligence remains connected, accessible, and useful throughout a building's lifecycle. Through the real-world story of the PAE Living Building, this session explores how architects, owners, and operators can move beyond fragmented data toward connected operational intelligence that endures technological change and supports the next generation of intelligent buildings.

Reg Prentice, TonicDM

BIM BOP:  Quality data as one component of AI usefulness

AI systems are only as useful as the data they reason over — and in AEC, the data that matters most lives in email. Email is where the real story of a design unfolds and it records the why of design decisions. If the goal is AI that's genuinely useful and trustworthy for designers, serious thought and engineering effort needs to go into the data layer. It requires email capture at scale, entity resolution, project linkage, permissions, and auditable usage, across potentially millions of messages. But with the data layer in place, AI will be able unlock this vast untapped design resource for the benefit of our firms and clients. 

Leo Salcé, Avant Leap

BIM BOP:  Catch It Before It Becomes Rework - Three AI-assisted Quality Checks in Five Minutes

What if BIM teams could catch deviations, missed markups, and model-quality issues before they become costly rework? This session demonstrates three practical AI-assisted quality-control workflows: comparing point clouds against Scan-to-BIM models, translating design markups into actionable Revit updates, and detecting model changes and recurring Revit warnings. The takeaway: AI can transform repetitive review into faster, more consistent, and more proactive quality control, while keeping professional judgment at the center.

Aleksander Tamm-Seitz, Morphosis

LECTURE:  From BIM to AI: Buckle Up for Architecture's Next Transformation

Architecture experienced a seismic shift in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the introduction of digital modeling and computational workflows. Forty years later, AI is poised to deliver an equally — if not greater — transformation to the field. To remain relevant and respected as industry leaders, we must not only acknowledge this shift but position ourselves at its forefront. This demands a fundamental rethinking of how we teach, practice, and build — from pedagogy in the classroom to production in the office.

Eric Yu, CannonDesign

LECTURE:  Transforming Topographical Constraints into Design Opportunities

 In large-scale master planning projects, a deep understanding of site conditions is critical to the success of the design. Multiple site analysis tools are available to provide powerful ways to visualize and understand complex topographical conditions. By revealing major terrain constraints early in the design process, it enables designers to develop informed and innovative responses. However, rather than treating these constraints as problems to be solved, how do we allows them to become opportunities that shape and enrich the project, transforming challenges into defining design features?