Digital Operations Stage

The built environment sector has struggled to find a standard way of sharing data effectively through whole life. The Universal Data Spine solves this challenge by capturing minimum, structured location and asset data, which then forms the core of asset registers for whole life. The use of the Universal Data Spine and newly aligned data standards create a single data system that works effectively with multiple use cases.

Find out why the New Hospital Programme will not only deliver new Intelligent Hospitals but also set a new national benchmark for digitally-enabled healthcare infrastructure. Hear about how its innovation in the built environment will potentially bring benefits for patients and staff for years to come.

Are our buildings ready to think for themselves? As Digital Twins become mainstream and AI capabilities mature, the built environment is edging closer to automation at scale. This session explores the promise and the pitfalls of self-managing buildings, from predictive maintenance and real-time energy optimisation to the risks of losing control, accountability and trust. This is a practical, thought-provoking session for anyone responsible for digital twins, FM, smart estates or net zero strategy, and anyone asking how far automation should really go.

Most smart buildings fail at handover – and suffer from performance drift thereafter – because “Foundation” (the digital spine) is disconnected from “Flow” (the operational activities required to deliver business outcomes).

Join the Digital Operations Working Group (DOWG) for a high-level fireside chat that moves beyond the hype of new tools to focus on right-to-left design for performance – specifically, the operationalisation of digital transformation.

Featuring Steven Boyd MBE and Gordon Mitchell, this session reveals the overarching logic of the Digital Operations Playbook. Discover how to bridge the project-to-performance gap, mitigate commercial risk, and turn digital ambition into boardroom-level operational integrity.

Learn how Mott MacDonald Bentley delivered over 3,000 asset surveys at pace by rapidly deploying an integrated digital ecosystem. This session showcases how Autodesk Construction Cloud: Build, Moata Geospatial and the Moata Reporting Framework were combined to create a unified workflow across ten partners, enabling real-time field data capture, logistics coordination and transparent reporting for all stakeholders. Discover how this streamlined, collaborative approach accelerated delivery, improved data quality and became critical to project success.

How can large education estates modernise without disrupting live operations or overspending on technology?
This real-world case study reveals how Ark Schools and One Creative Environments used a digital twin proof of concept to transform estate data, condition surveys and facilities management at King Solomon Academy, creating a scalable foundation for a trust-wide smart estate.
Ideal for estates, FM, capital and digital leaders looking to move from reactive maintenance to predictive, data-led decision making while supporting net zero and long-term funding strategies.

From IoT sensors and building analytics platforms to fault detection diagnostics (FDD) and artificial intelligence applications, the session will introduce a framework for making informed decisions when purchasing smart building technology. It will give practical guidance on the system and process changes needed to optimise building operations, reducing energy and maintenance costs, and enhancing sustainability and occupant experience.

Across the built environment, at every stage of the lifecycle from design and construction to operation, we are facing the same systemic problem: we still don’t have reliable, connected asset information. Data is produced in silos, lost at handover, inconsistently governed or never created at all. The result is familiar to everyone with performance gaps, duplicated effort, rising compliance pressure and decisions made on incomplete or unreliable information.

This session introduces Asset Intelligence as a new discipline designed to address this industry-wide challenge. Rather than focusing on tools or standards in isolation, Asset Intelligence defines the foundational capability that allows information to flow consistently from design and construction into decades of operation.

In this talk, Nick Hutchinson will outline why traditional approaches to BIM, digital handover and asset management haven’t closed the gap and what a practical, modern framework for Asset Intelligence looks like. Attendees will learn how to recognise the true root causes of information failure, how both new and existing estates can establish Asset Intelligence through different pathways, and what “good” looks like in practice.

Whether you’re delivering a project, running a facility, or managing a national estate, this session will give you the clarity and structure to start strengthening your organisation’s information foundations. You’ll leave with a simple model for assessing your current maturity, a shared language to take back to your teams and practical steps for building a digital strategy that delivers real operational value – not just more data.

How BAM UK & Ireland delivered digital construction excellence via the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT) Standard Information Management Plan (SIMP) and enabled a live Digital Twin powered by Autodesk on the world’s largest Passivhaus school.

BAM UK & Ireland are heading to Digital Construction Week to showcase how best practice information management delivers real-world sustainability. George McFaulds & Mark Turner will be presenting a deep dive into the Woodmill and St Columba’s High Schools, driving the digital and information management delivery that enabled BAM UK & Ireland to manage this project across its full lifecycle.

By aligning with the Scottish Futures Trust Standard Information Management Plan (SIMP) and working closely with our client teams from Hub East Central Scotland, Fife Council (client) and Okana (client information manager) we ensured every byte of asset data served a purpose – bridging the gap between BAM Construction and FM operations.

Key performance milestones:
Efficiency: Operating 20% better than original energy targets and cutting energy bills by £433,392 and reducing energy consumption by 48% in its first year of operation.
Airtightness: Achieved 0.4 air changes/hour, exceeding the Passivhaus 0.6 requirement.
Digital QA: Leveraged Autodesk BIM 360 to accelerate and evidence stringent Passivhaus certification.
Digital Twin: Rich asset data (COBie) and NBS Uniclass structured digital handover information enabled a seamless transition to Autodesk Tandem, monitoring 150 metering points every 30 minutes for real-time comfort and efficiency.

Join our session to explore:
SFT SIMP (PIR, AIR, EIR): Navigating standards for high-performance delivery.
COBie to Tandem: Enabling the seamless live Digital Twin transition.
Post-occupancy reality: Turning digital innovation into long-term operational ROI.

Most digital estates are stupid – not because the people are stupid, but because the information was designed to die young.

Projects end. Estates don’t. But almost everything we create is optimised for the first two years of a building’s life. This talk is about the other 98.

We’ll introduce Estates Thinking: a mindset that treats information as a long-term estate asset rather than a short-term project deliverable. You’ll discover why project-first behaviour keeps producing document-heavy handovers, confidently wrong dashboards and “digital twins” that are really just expensive mirrors; and how flipping to Estate First > Projects Second turns IM, digital tools and AI into something finally worthy of the word ‘smart’.

Tired of O&M manuals that are all bulk and no bite? This session reveals how a forward-thinking client and developer tore up the rulebook to create concise, meaningful, and truly usable building information.

Join Hoppa and AtkinsRéalis to see how human and AI collaboration transformed decades of legacy asset data into a predictive maintenance engine for a major UK airport, by extracting critical information 500× faster than manual methods. Mining historic infrastructure records for key facts greatly reduced the need for on-site surveys and unlocked analytics opportunities previously blocked by the high cost of manual data wrangling, while keeping expert engineering judgment at the heart of decision-making in a highly regulated environment.

Commissioning & validation are one of the most important elements in project delivery – yet they are often the most undervalued and squeezed.

When commissioning is rushed and operations are treated as an afterthought, project risk is increased, FM ends up on the back foot and occupiers pay the price through poor comfort, wasted energy, and avoidable operational issues.

Join a cross-disciplinary panel covering contractors, commissioning managers, FM and digital monitoring experts to explore the role of validation, improving soft landings, and how MBCx and CCx are reshaping validation and lifecycle accountability.

If you care about delivering buildings that actually work for the people inside them, this session is not to be missed.

Across one of the UK’s most varied and historically complex estates, the Defence Housing Service (DHS) faces the familiar challenge of inheriting decades of inconsistent asset information created under multiple delivery approaches, contractors and evolving standards. In this fireside chat, the DHS’ Bryn Turner will share how they’re cutting through legacy data issues, prioritising pragmatism over perfection and reshaping their information requirements to serve real operational needs.

This session will explore what they stopped doing, what they changed and what’s actually working – offering honest lessons learned and practical guidance for anyone trying to move from information overload to information that matters. Facilitated by Glider’s founder Nick Hutchinson, this discussion shines a light on the realities of estate-wide digital operations and the mindset shifts needed to make progress at scale.

Experience Virtual Site Access (VSA) from AtkinsRéalis, a secure service that turns 360° and LiDAR capture into secure Digital Twins for real-time remote site access via desktop, VR, and immersive rooms. See the full workflow from capture and AI processing to delivery, plus a deployment playbook covering tooling, workflows, human factors, and cybersecurity. It is proven across flagship UK energy and infrastructure programmes. Learn how immersive collaboration and safe AI redaction accelerate reviews, training, and decisions today, with a clear roadmap toward robotic inspections.

Most smart buildings fail to reach their potential because the technical logic is lost in the noise of construction delivery. When the integration “logic” is buried as a sub-package of the mechanical or electrical works, the owner-operator pays the price through decades of operational friction.

Join a cross-disciplinary panel moderated by One Sightsolutions, featuring owner-operators, design, build, and operations teams, to explore the emergence of the master systems coordinator (MSC). We will discuss why the industry must shift to a design for performance management model – separating logic from labour to ensure that the AEC team delivers a building that is operationally ready on day 1. Discover how the MSC acts as the vital bridge, partnering with commissioning to ensure the “digital handshake” is a catalyst for successful soft landings and AI-driven smart FM.

Most “Digital Twins” are just expensive mirrors – high-resolution theatre that flatters your BIM model but changes nothing.

In this provoking session, we expose why so many twins fail: weak information foundations, no identity, no memory, and project-first data that dies the moment the keys are handed over. You’ll learn how to escape the illusion of knowing and navigate the real journey from model → shadow → twin → hub; from looking clever to actually being intelligent.

If your twin doesn’t think, adapt, or remember… it isn’t a twin. It’s confidence in 3D.

Come learn how to build the alternative: a second brain for your estate.

As the built environment becomes increasingly digital, cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue – it’s a safety, compliance and business-critical challenge. From BIM models and CDEs to AI-driven workflows and operational asset data, digital information now underpins how buildings and infrastructure are designed, delivered and managed.

This CPD-approved session explores how cyber threats such as ransomware, email fraud and data leakage are targeting the construction and engineering sector, and what this means for the golden thread of information under the Building Safety Act. Using real-world examples from construction projects, including a £60,000 intercepted invoice fraud attempt, Bellingham IT will show how cyber risks can disrupt projects, compromise safety data and damage trust.

Attendees will learn practical strategies to secure digital workflows using zero trust principles, multifactor authentication, Microsoft 365 security controls and cyber-aware culture building. The session will also cover AI governance and how to protect intellectual property and sensitive data in an era of generative AI.

If you’re responsible for digital delivery, asset data, BIM, project delivery or compliance, this session will give you actionable insights to protect your digital construction ecosystem without slowing innovation.

AI in hospitals often stalls at the same hurdles: fragmented building systems, inconsistent data, and unclear routes from prototype to operational use. This session shares a practical, repeatable model for overcoming those barriers through a focused research collaboration, linking NHS Trust use cases, the New Hospital Programme’s intelligent hospital agenda, and a live partnership between Okana, Ryder and Computer Science students at Northumbria University.

You’ll hear what the research explored – e.g., predictive maintenance, energy optimisation, environmental monitoring, and smarter operational scheduling – and what it found about where AI can genuinely improve efficiency, resilience, and human-centred care outcomes. The session will also unpack what needs to be in place to make AI workable in practice: robust data infrastructure, stronger system connectivity, and clear governance.

Grounded in real constraints and real use cases, this is a practical look at how cross-disciplinary research can accelerate AI-enabled smart hospital capability while keeping patient and staff experience at the centre.

The concept of capsule homes is quickly becoming a reality, but “smart” only works if the digital layer is incorporated from the start. The entire process from a factory-built capsule unit to a cloud-connected home that tenants can manage from any location is broken down.

Discover how to design the smart infrastructure, choose the appropriate IoT devices for energy, security, lighting, and climate monitoring, and commission the system to ensure its dependability after installation. Additionally, you will learn how user access and alarms may be set, how data flows into a web app dashboard, and how to expand and maintain smart modular houses across numerous units. Anticipate useful lessons, real-world pitfalls, and a structure that you may use again for your next project.