Eleni Chatzi Delivers Keynote at AI in AEC 2025

The AI in AEC 2025 conference, held in Helsinki, gathered global leaders at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the built environment. Among the keynote speakers, Prof. Eleni Chatzi of our Chair of Structural Mechanics & Monitoring at ETH Zürich, brought a visionary perspective on integrating physics-based simulation, surrogate modeling, and Graph Neural Networks to monitor the health of critical infrastructure—from bridges and tunnels to road and rail networks.

Her keynote underscored the shift from reactive maintenance to predictive operations enabled by AI-powered digital twins. Her work bridges the gap between academic rigor and real-world application, showing how structural health monitoring can benefit from AI models that are not only data-driven but grounded in physical laws.

The presentation resonated strongly with the conference’s overarching message: AI is no longer a future promise, but a present imperative in reshaping how we design, construct, and sustain our built environment. Across the sessions, a clear consensus emerged—leveraging AI in AEC requires more than digital add-ons. It demands capitalizing on our engineering knowledge and intuition, a rethinking of core workflows and value creation across the asset lifecycle.

The event struck a rare and valuable balance between vision and implementation, showcasing use cases ranging from knowledge graph-driven compliance to RAG pipelines for civil planning and LLM-based stakeholder engagement tools.

With contributions like Chatzi’s, the AI in AEC 2025 conference affirmed that the built world is entering a new era—one where intelligence, resilience, and sustainability are engineered together from the ground up.