Embracing Digital

Digital developments enable us to boost our positive impact for clients and society as well as increase our efficiency and productivity. Our ability to integrate digital into our services, solutions and ways of working directly impacts our market position, competitiveness and attractiveness as an employer. For our clients, digitalisation and the opportunity to use data to optimise decision making and efficiency in their assets and operations is an integral part of what they expect from us. We are seeing increasing demand for digital twins – highly accurate, virtual versions of the physical world. These are being applied in all markets. Project examples include a digital twin for the management and treatment of nuclear waste and we are developing a digital twin that will provide real-time representation of the construction process and supply chain for residential properties (EaSiCon). By providing tactical and operational planning, major efficiency improvements in materials transport and construction can be achieved.

We add most value to our clients where domain knowledge and digital services are an integrated offering. We want client engagement and go-to-market to be as simple as possible. That is why we decided to transfer the market facing advisory groups from our Business Line Digital into the market oriented (domain) business lines effective from January 2025. We also launched a new Digital Solutions Centre, combining all existing central digital support teams in one unit.

One of the benefits for our clients of digital technologies like generative AI is the ability it provides us to analyse large data sets and compare large numbers of scenarios. The Global Flood Risk Tool, for example, is a cloud-based platform designed to deliver accurate and comprehensible flood risk analysis. Singapore’s national water agency PUB awarded us a contract to conduct a flood risk assessment for the country using this risk tool. The study will evaluate the economic and social risks of coastal flooding and recommend optimal protection standards. The ability to compare large numbers of scenarios to better inform decisions, is also demonstrated in the use of parametric modelling to solve design challenges and optimise material use and pedestrian comfort for a hybrid steel fibre-reinforced polymer bridge over a canal in Sweden.

We have developed a platform to capture our own data. It improves quality control, risk management and is used in our digital services. We continued to explore opportunities from Artificial Intelligence while paying attention to risks, and updated our usage policy. A companywide AI training week took place which included more than 30 sessions to develop skills. In addition, AI workshops were joined by 25% of our colleagues and we hosted hackathons on computational design and automation in consultancy in the Netherlands and Indonesia. Our annual Digital Talent programme helping our experts turn ideas for new tools and solutions into a reality had the theme 'data-driven'. We are piloting AI office tools and experimenting with Generative AI (GenAI) tools for tender processes and to support our consultants, engineers and software developers. We introduced a chatbot to answer questions about our Nereda wastewater treatment technology.