Bridging the Gap: The 2025 digital design & construction report
What 2,000 AEC leaders revealed about the industry's biggest challenges — and what's next.
About the research
Commissioned by Revizto and conducted by Censuswide, the Revizto survey captures the views of more than 2,000 AEC professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The majority of respondents are senior leaders — C-suite executives, CIOs, BIM and VDC managers, and digital engineering practitioners — from firms with annual revenues above $100 million, working on projects ranging from $51 million to over $1 billion.
This construction report is a wide-angle look at how the architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) industry is responding to mounting project complexity, shifting budgets, workforce pressures, and the push to modernize a sector long considered one of the world's least efficient. If you lead technology, digital delivery, or digital construction reporting at an AEC firm, the findings offer benchmarks you can take straight back to your team.
See what's holding the industry back
Budget blowouts
How much do AEC projects really exceed budget? The answer surprised even industry veterans.
The #1 barrier
Cost isn't the biggest obstacle to technology adoption. What's really slowing the industry down?
Demand vs. delivery
Infrastructure demand is surging globally. But one persistent problem keeps slowing delivery across sectors.
What you'll find inside the report
Bridging the Gap 2025 examines the themes shaping digital design and construction today. Each section combines global survey data with commentary from practitioners inside some of the most ambitious projects currently underway — and surfaces some of the top solutions for bridging design and code in 2025 and 2026.
Infrastructure construction solutions and where demand is growing
Infrastructure dominates the current pipeline — but the regional picture is far from uniform. The report breaks down where AEC leaders in each surveyed country are seeing the greatest demand for design and build services, from energy and utilities to transportation, civic centers, and retrofit projects, and what that means for teams already working against tighter timelines and thinner margins.
Unified 2D and 3D collaboration across distributed teams
When projects span disciplines, coordinate systems, and continents, the software stack has to keep pace. The report looks at which tools AEC teams rely on most, why collaboration platforms are rising in importance, and how firms at projects like Pittsburgh International Airport are using a unified 2D and 3D environment to bring point clouds, Revit models, and distributed teams into a single source of truth.
Data center construction at record pace
Data centers are among the fastest-growing segments of the demand pipeline — and among the hardest to deliver. Two case studies — a hyperscale facility delivered by Haskoning on a ten-week design timeline and a three-phase build at Virginia's Red Rum Data Center — take you inside the coordination, MEP integration, and live-linked modeling approaches that made both projects possible.
Construction data security, ownership, and the long-term asset
Centralized data has value well beyond handover. The report examines how asset owners — including the Smithsonian Institution and the Snowy 2.0 renewable energy project in Australia — are beginning to treat their project data as a strategic asset for predictive maintenance, regulatory compliance, and the full asset lifecycle. It's a shift that depends on data accessibility across the whole stakeholder chain: getting the right information to the right people at the right moment, for decades after handover.
BIM issue management and the real barriers to technology adoption
Adoption has always been the industry's sticking point, but the 2025 findings reframe the conversation. The report explores what's really slowing teams down (hint: it isn't what most leadership assumes), what it takes to make digital adoption stick across project teams, and why integrated BIM issue management — stamps, automated workflows, closed-loop accountability — is becoming a baseline requirement rather than a nice-to-have.