Design software vendors have spent two years promising AI that understands your projects. Arcadis has taken a different route: it’s handing the model its own answers.
On Sept. 28 the Dutch engineering firm announced an expanded collaboration with Autodesk that embeds Arcadis’s internal knowledge, technical standards and design guidance into Autodesk’s Design and Make platform, Autodesk AI and Autodesk Assistant. The connective tissue is Model Context Protocol. Arcadis runs its own MCP servers and wires them to Autodesk Assistant, so when a designer asks the assistant a question, the answer comes back shaped by Arcadis practice rather than the general corpus.
What the MCP connection actually changes
MCP is a straightforward idea that turns out to matter a lot in professional services. It lets a firm expose its own reference material to a model at query time without shipping that material to the vendor. Arcadis says it keeps full ownership of everything it builds on its side of the connection, which is the point: the firm’s standards are the asset, and handing them over wholesale to a platform would be handing over the business.
The claimed benefit is concrete but thin. Arcadis says automation has already reduced one quality-review cycle from five days to about half a day. That’s a company figure, from a single unnamed example spanning North America and Europe, and it isn’t a controlled comparison. Treat it as directional.
See Through Walls and the retrofit problem
The one named joint project is called See Through Walls, and it goes after a real gap. Retrofit and reuse work stalls on not knowing what’s inside an existing building: what the slab is, where the services run, how much capacity the frame has left. Surveys are expensive and destructive. The project combines AI, sensor data and predictive modeling to infer condition from what can be measured without opening anything up.
If it works at a useful confidence level it changes the economics of adaptive reuse, which is the dominant growth area in European commercial construction. If it doesn’t, it’s another decision-support tool that engineers override. Nobody has published accuracy figures yet.
What wasn’t announced
There’s no money in this, or none disclosed. No product, no release date, no exclusivity. Arcadis CEO Heather Polinsky and Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost both gave quotes; neither committed to anything measurable. Arcadis carries roughly 34,000 people and posted €4.9 billion in 2025 gross revenues across more than 30 countries, so the firm has the scale to make a platform partnership worth Autodesk’s attention.
The structural point is worth more than the announcement. Contractors piloting automation jumped from 12% to 32% in the last year, and accuracy, not labor cost, was the reason they gave. A model that answers with your firm’s standards is an accuracy play. Expect the other large consultancies to build the same thing, because the alternative is letting a vendor’s default answer become the industry’s default answer.