What decades of construction projects can teach Al models

For most people, digital twins evoke futuristic visions of smart cities or gleaming sky-scrapers. But for Bimal Pat-wari, the chief executive of Pinnacle Infotech, the technology is solving a far less glamorous problem: a global construction industry that, despite building ever more sophisticated air-ports, semiconductor fabs and data centres, has barely become more productive over the past three decades."Every other industry has transformed itself. Banking, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing-produc-tivity has gone up dramatically," Patwari said. "Construction = has improved by only about 20% in 30 years. Even agriculture has done far better: The pain has been there for years." That productivity gap has created an opportunity for Pinnacle Infotech, a company that most people outside the engineering world have never heard of. Founded in Durgapur, West Bengal, in 1991, the company began by serving the domestic construction market before expanding overseas in 1997 and opening its first US office in 2002. Today it employs more than 5,000 engineers and architects across India, with smaller teams in the US, Japan, Middle East, Singapore, Canada and Saudi Arabia. Roughly 98% of its business comes from overseas.Airports to semicon facilitiesIts engineers work on some of the world's most complex infrastructure projects, from airports and semiconductor facilities to hyperscale data centres. Patwari said Pinnacle has worked on more than 250 data centres globally and has been advising Dubai Airports for over a decade, where dozens of its engineers operate from an innovation lab inside the airport authority."Wherever you see some of the biggest projects under construction in the world, there is an Indian flag there," Patwari said. system originally developed in Madurai before Pinnacle acquired the company behind it. Patwari said the software is now being rolled out globally alongside the firm's digital twin offerings."We want InnoMaint to become the Google of the maintenance in-dustry," Patwari said. Pinnacle has worked on more than 18,000 projects, and Patwari is now looking to use the engineering knowledge accumulated from them to build AI systems. "How do we build LLMs from that knowledge and help the next engineer?"Lusail Stadium in Qatar, where Pinnacle Infotech provided Building Information Modelling (BIM) engineering, using 3D modelling and digital tools to coordinate design and construction. Digital twins, he said, are only one piece of a much larger transfor-mation. The bigger shift, he believes, is the emergence of construction as a data industry rather than simply a physical one.Today's buildings contain exponentially more engineering than those built even 15 years ago. Hospitals are filled with robotic operating theatres, semiconductor fabs depend on dozens of specialised gases, and modern airports integrate thousands of interconnected systems. At the same time, projects increasingly involve consultants, contractors and suppliers spread across multiple countries, making coordination vastly more complicated. The industry, he said, has become fragmented, but the flow of information has not an airport or a semiconductor plant, you need to know every asset, where it came from, its maintenance schedule, its technical specifications and how it connects with everything else." Pinnacle's answer is to build digital twins that continuously monitor physical infrastructure through thousands of sensors. The system creates a virtual replica of the build-ing, tracking equipment performance in real time and warning operators before failures occur.The technology is also changing how Pinnacle develops software in-ternally. Rather than merely adopting Gen AI tools, the company is building its own intellectual property on top of them.One of those products is InnoMaint, a computerised maintenance management kept pace. Most projects generate vast amounts of engineering information during design and construction, but much of that knowledge is lost by the time facilities managers take over."The data is the king," he said. "To run Building with small-town talent Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Pinnacle's strategy lies not in its technology but in where that technology is built. While much of India's software industry remains concentrated in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, Pinnacle has deliberately expanded into tier-two cities such as Durgapur, Jaipur and Madurai."Talent is everywhere," Patwari said. "We just need to give people the infra-structure, the training and the tools." The company's Durgapur centre alone employs around 1,600 people, while many engineers in Madurai commute from villages within a 150-kilometre radius.Patwari believes that approach has become one of Pinnacle's competitive advantages, especially as construction worldwide struggles with a shortage of skilled workers. But he also sees a broader lesson for India's technology industry."We cannot remain only service providers," he said. "Automation will reduce the amount of manpower needed. The growth will come from developing technology, not simply adopting technology."