The interoperability problem isn’t going away.
It’s changing shape.
From at least the past 10 years, we’ve been asking: how do we make systems talk to each other? IFC, open BIM, CDEs, connected project platforms. Real work. Real progress. And still — a geotechnical report in a PDF, a structural spec in a Word doc, a contract variation buried in someone’s inbox.
We haven’t finished that battle.
I’ve been watching something play out in the software world that I can’t stop thinking about in the context of construction.
Resend — an email API — quietly became the default recommendation from Claude and ChatGPT across millions of interactions. Not because it was the best email tool. Because it structured its documentation so that agents could read it. Clean markdown. Code snippets at every step. A dedicated file that told LLMs exactly what the product does and how to use it.
Meanwhile, Groq — a faster and cheaper alternative for AI transcription — kept losing to older tools. Not because of performance. Because its docs were harder to parse. Agents couldn’t find the right answer quickly, so they recommended something else.
The thing that gets chosen is not the best product. It’s the most readable one.
This is the conversation I think we’re not having in AEC.
We have data. Enormous amounts of it. Models, specifications, reports, contracts, drawings, codes. Decades of accumulated project knowledge. But almost none of it is structured for the agents that will increasingly coordinate, check compliance, procure materials, and surface decisions across our projects.
We know what it looks like to start solving this. The industry has been inching toward machine-readable building data for years — the instinct has always been right. The question now is whether we take the next step: not just making data portable between systems, but making it genuinely surfable by agents.
The next 10 years of interoperability won’t be about making systems talk to each other.
It will be about making our data readable to the things that will coordinate, check compliance, procure materials, and make decisions — automatically, across every project.
We have the same fragmentation issue, but there’s a great opportunity to address it using a different approach!