Yacoob Kurimbokus, chief product & technology officer at Sensat, explores the role digital twins have to play in the renewed drive to deliver UK infrastructure and housing
The UK government has doubled down on its commitment to fast-track national infrastructure and housing delivery, with a record number of major projects now green-lit and new planning reforms designed to cut up to a year off delivery times. Backed by its 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy, this drive aims to tackle the housing crisis, support regional growth, and strengthen the nation’s long-term productivity.
For construction firms, this acceleration brings both opportunity and pressure. With red tape being stripped away and ambitious housing targets to hit, the focus is firmly on speed. Still, professionals across the built environment know that planning remains an intricate, detail-driven process. The faster that process moves, the greater the risk of oversight, and even small mistakes can have significant commercial and operational consequences, eroding margins and threatening project viability.
As the UK’s infrastructure ambitions scale up, construction players are being asked to deliver more, faster, and with less margin for error, a perfect storm that demands thoughtful planning, sharper risk management, and stronger digital oversight from day one.
The big picture
Increased urbanisation and potential crowding of buildings in towns and cities pose several risks. First and foremost, it involves clarifying the suitability of construction or redevelopment on a specific area of land.
Project planners need to be aware of factors such as the location of water mains, power lines and other public infrastructure to ensure that they select cost-effective, practical options, and mitigate issues that could arise in later phases of construction. For critical infrastructure projects, they are also concerned about matters such as flood risks, conservation areas, sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), public rights of way, and electoral wards (which can have sizable political implications).
Another danger is that, in the clamour to deliver on the Government’s house-building & infrastructure promises, environmental concerns could be overlooked at the planning stage, e.g. protected trees or wildlife habitats could be threatened, which could later significantly delay projects or derail them entirely.
Likewise, project planners need to be fully aware and up-to-date on any other planned activity in the area that could overlap with their own in some way or impact the progress of the build. With fast-track planning now being actively encouraged by central government, the potential for such clashes has increased dramatically.
So, how can construction planners spot potential overlaps in a timely way and avoid costly hold-ups?
A visual solution
The solution lies in the digital visualisation of data to unlock efficiencies and digital twins are a key part of those efforts. They enable firms to harness vast and complex data sets to streamline every stage of the asset lifecycle. Access to this information needs to be democratised and it needs to be made actionable. Interactive visualisation is the most natural and fastest way to achieve that.
In the geospatial space, this means creating digital twins of assets that capture their full complexity, granularity and interplay with their surroundings. Composed of multiple layers of rich data, digital twins help businesses to digitally visualise projects and assets for planning, construction and management processes, reducing costs, risks and delays. It also puts more power into the hands of workers across the construction supply chain.
This can only lead to better outcomes, more design nuances and planning risks identified up front, faster action when problems occur during construction, and the ability to preempt asset maintenance issues.
These twins allow decision-makers to engage with multimodal datasets, covering everything from terrain and infrastructure to environmental factors, and interrogate them in intuitive ways. By transforming data into an interactive, visual form, stakeholders gain clarity on assets regardless of scale or complexity, enabling faster and more confident decision-making.
The impact of AI
Geospatial AI tech has strong potential to accelerate and automate workflows across leading construction, engineering, and infrastructure projects, starting with smaller tasks and expanding as the technology becomes more powerful. While the technology’s long-term potential is significant, its current strength lies in augmenting existing processes and improving efficiency on specific tasks.
Today, it can be used to enhance scans of reality, produce immersive 3D environments from video, perform visual search on geospatial datasets, and create studio-level renders in seconds for public consultations. It can also act as an assistant, identifying relevant datasets during planning and helping to identify clashes.
As the technology matures, its role will expand further. By integrating real-time data from sensors, IoT devices, and satellites, AI-driven digital twins can monitor material flow, movement of equipment, and site hazards. Dynamic scenarios can be simulated, such as site traffic flow or emergency response under extreme weather. More broadly, AI-enabled digital twins will evolve into predictive tools that support proactive, data-driven decision-making.
Generative AI is also beginning to reshape design workflows. Urban planners can input constraints such as population density or environmental impact, and the model can suggest ideal city layouts or transport networks. Similarly, ecological simulations can predict the effects of infrastructure projects, enabling sustainable decision-making. This approach enables iterative planning and the rapid evaluation of multiple scenarios.
The benefits for construction firms
For construction companies, the benefits are tangible and numerous.
Firstly, the use of digital twins can deliver cost savings for under-pressure construction firms. Alongside streamlined planning and scheduling, digital twins can also help reduce delays, minimise waste, optimise resource allocation, and reduce rework. More precise instructions lead to fewer errors by onsite teams, boosting productivity.
In addition, digital twins can make regulatory compliance easier and provide an easy-to-understand audit trail of decisions and changes, eventually performing automated checks against planning and environmental standards as plans evolve. This shared, central resource also supports collaboration, with improved alignment across those involved (project managers, architects, engineers, contractors, and regulators). It also provides a ‘golden thread’ of information across the full lifecycle of an asset.
Stakeholders can interrogate and visualise assets in real time, which makes it easier for non-technical teams to understand project impacts and enables “what if” scenario planning, such as environmental changes and supply delays.
Constructing a smarter future
Digitalisation is reshaping how buildings are designed, constructed and maintained. The use of digital twins is no longer optional; it has become essential for firms aiming to remain competitive.
Fortunately, construction firms no longer have to start from scratch. Today, some of the world’s largest construction, engineering, and critical infrastructure companies are actively involved in contributing to advanced Geospatial AI models to guide and inform future construction projects. These models enable businesses to access spatially intelligent digital twins and extract value from huge pools of previously inaccessible data.
The adoption of digital twins will shape the future of critical infrastructure, injecting newfound agility into construction businesses and turning ambitious targets into achievable outcomes.
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