The Most Overhyped Tech in BIM Isn't AI with Dhanjeet Sah

For more than a decade, the construction industry has been waiting for the digital twin to take over. It hasn't. Meanwhile, a quieter idea reshaped how every project actually runs, and almost no one was talking about it.

Dhanjeet Sah, Studio BIM Manager at FK Architects, has spent 27 years watching this pattern repeat. He started in CAD in late-1990s Nepal, moved through Dubai and Singapore, and has spent the last 18 years in Australia. He has beta-tested Autodesk software since 2003. If anyone has earned the right to call hype, it's him.

The most useful thing in this conversation isn't a prediction. It's a way of thinking about which technologies deserve your attention, and which ones are quietly stealing it.

The Digital Twin Was Oversold. Here's the Evidence.

Back in 2012, Dhanjeet sat in a session where presenters claimed the digital twin would overtake BIM within five to ten years.

Fifteen years later, it hasn't.

His read is blunt. It may have found real traction in manufacturing, but in the architectural and building-operation space, he hasn't seen the success stories that were promised. The talks continue. The use cases don't.

This matters because the digital twin absorbed an enormous amount of industry attention, conference time, and budget conversations that could have gone elsewhere. The cost of hype isn't just disappointment. It's the focus you spent waiting.

Meanwhile, the Common Data Environment Quietly Won

Nobody put the common data environment on a keynote stage promising it would change everything.

It just slowly became the way work gets done.

Dhanjeet frames it as a cultural shift, not a feature. The CDE moved the industry from one-person workmanship to genuinely collaborative delivery, where the whole AEC chain works inside a shared environment. That's a bigger change than any single tool.

The lesson is worth sitting with. The technologies that transform an industry often arrive without noise. They win on efficiency, not on marketing.

Why Singapore Adopts Faster Than Australia

Working across four countries gave Dhanjeet a clear view of how adoption actually happens.

In Singapore, the government made BIM mandatory for projects above a set value. The response was simple: it has to be done, so let's do it. Fast, top-down, decisive.

Australia took a different path. No mandate, but firms picked up BIM anyway because it made them more efficient. Slower, but driven by genuine conviction rather than compliance.

His estimate is striking. What Singapore rolled out in four years might take Australia fourteen. Neither approach is wrong, but if you're leading change, knowing which culture you're in tells you how to push.

The Skill That Separates a Technician From a Mentor

A brilliant BIM technician can solve hard problems on one project or many. That's valuable, but it's not leadership.

The mentor does something different. They transfer knowledge so the team can work without them.

Dhanjeet is clear that this is a separate skill from being a software specialist, and that becoming a mentor doesn't mean abandoning your technical edge. You still sit on top of the work. You still solve the problems no one else can. You just stop being the only person who can.

For anyone planning the jump from expert to leader, this is the gap to close on purpose.

How AI Actually Shows Up in BIM Work

Dhanjeet's view on AI is refreshingly grounded. He thought the job-loss panic was overhyped, and he treats AI as something that enhances skill rather than replaces it.

At FK Architects, his team runs an internal agent that reviews BIM Execution Plans. When another company sends a BEP, it gets compared against their own to surface risks and differences. Work that might take him an hour or two, with the human risk of missing something, gets a faster, sharper first pass.

He also uses it to close his own knowledge gaps. Ask him the best practices for grouping in Revit and he might know eight of them. AI fills in the other two, and he learns something.

The discipline is the point. He isn't relying on AI 100%. He treats it as a second opinion, then applies his own judgment to decide what's valid.

What Gets Automated, and What Stays Human

Dhanjeet expects the manual layers of BIM management to shrink. Clash detection, coordination, the creation and review of execution plans, much of the documentation grind, all of it trending toward semi-automation.

But the core of the role survives, because it was never really about the tools.

It's about decisions. AI can answer for you, but someone still has to be on top of those answers, validate them, and sign their name. Human consciousness, as he puts it, doesn't stop.

His advice to the next generation lands here. A newcomer can now compress ten years of learning into one or two, because information is instant. But experience still can't be downloaded. The people who win will pair fast information with hard-earned judgment.