Every AEC software vendor has spent two years telling the industry that AI changes everything. On August 6, the one with $1.5 billion of recurring revenue put a number on it. The number is zero.
Bentley Systems reported second-quarter revenue of $410.7 million, up 12.8% year over year, with subscriptions of $378.6 million making up roughly 92% of the top line. Annualized recurring revenue reached $1,536.0 million at June 30, against $1,379.2 million a year earlier, 12% growth in constant currency. Perpetual licenses came in at $9.7 million, under 2.4% of revenue. The transition to subscription is effectively finished.
What the CEO Actually Said About AI
Nicholas Cumins described Bentley as “instrumenting more of our engineering applications so that users can combine our trusted, deterministic engines for modeling, analysis, and simulation with the reasoning capabilities of their preferred AI assistants.” He added that accounts “are beginning to apply these capabilities on live projects, creating value that we intend to monetize in due course.”
That’s a careful sentence, and it’s worth reading twice. The deployments are real. The revenue is not yet. If you are benchmarking a vendor pitch against something, benchmark it against this.
The Margin Went the Wrong Way
Operating income margin fell to 21.6% from 23.2%, a 160-basis-point compression, and first-half free cash flow declined to $251.7 million from $273.4 million. Bentley attributes both to the cost of going live with new enterprise finance and quote-to-cash platforms. Adjusted EBITDA still grew, to $143.4 million from $129.3 million, and net debt leverage sits at 1.9x with a mid-2027 convertible maturity ahead.
The number that hasn’t moved is dollar-based net retention: 109%, flat year over year. Growth is coming from adding accounts and raising prices rather than existing customers spending materially more. For a company positioning itself around a platform expansion story, twelve months of flat retention is the quieter counterpoint.
Where the Money Is Coming From
Cumins said growth was led by Resources, then Public Works and Utilities including the electric grid. Not vertical construction. That maps onto what infrastructure owners are actually funding right now, and it’s a reasonable leading indicator of where design-phase backlog is forming for 2027. It also lines up with the kind of long-duration civil and water work showing up on projects like the FM Area Diversion, where the engineering spend runs for years before anyone pours concrete.
For owners standardizing on Bentley tools, there’s a practical takeaway hiding in the monetization line. AI assistance is arriving inside software you already license, and it will be repriced once Bentley decides how. Lock AI usage rights and pricing terms into your next renewal, not the one after the meter turns on.