AECtech+ 2026 | Boston. AECtech Boston 2026 was the 2nd Boston event hosted by Thornton Tomasetti | CORE studio, in partnership with CBT Architects, Perkins & Will, Suffolk Construction, and Speckle. This year saw an expanded program with an AI in AEC Panel discussion and Happy Hour hosted by Speckle at Suffolk's Headquarters. SPECKLE Happy Hour & AI Panel. The event kicked off with an evening AI Panel and Happy Hour on Thursday, August 20th. The evening featured candid conversations on one of the industry's most pressing questions about AI, from the perspective of leaders across AECO and a panel of representatives from the Technology space. Workshops. A practical guide to MCP & multi-agent workflows. Agentic AI and MCPs are all the rage these days, but it can be difficult to separate hype from substance. If you'd like to learn about these emerging technologies but aren't sure where to start, join its full-day workshop for a step-by-step, beginner-friendly, and AEC-focused walkthrough of the latest AI protocols. You will learn what Model Context Protocol is, how it works, and how to build your own MCP servers to help automate various design workflows. AEC Tech will also take a look at MCP features within the latest release of the Swiftlet Grasshopper plugin, which will let AEC Tech interact with a Rhino model using an LLM. From there, AEC Tech will explore AI agents, how to easily build them using open-source frameworks, and how to let multiple agents collaborate with each other via the A2A (Agent to Agent) protocol. Senior associate applications engineer. Collaborative vibe coding for AEC. This is a fun, collaborative vibe-coding workshop focused on how teams can rapidly develop toward a shared goal. Rather than treating "one-shotting" an app as a solitary exercise, the workshop will show how designers, technologists, and subject-matter experts can work together to frame a problem, define scope, contribute domain knowledge, test assumptions, and refine a working prototype. Participants will leave with a practical framework they can bring back to their firms to make vibe coding more collaborative, engaging, and useful. No coding background necessary, just a laptop with a browser and curiosity. You'll learn to use AI to write code, use GitHub to collaborate with your team (branches, pull requests, merge conflicts and all), and build small AEC-flavored apps - a 3D viewer, a markup tool, and/or a data dashboard. You'll walk out ready for the next day's hackathon, and the resources and knowledge needed to run this exact workshop back at your own firm.

Suffolk Technologies invests in Speckle. Construction-focused VC firm aims to normalise BIM data for AI and analytics pipelines. Suffolk Technologies, the venture capital platform affiliated with Suffolk Construction, has made an investment in Speckle, a data interoperability platform that extracts and normalises BIM data from authoring tools such as Revit, Civil 3D, Rhino, ArchiCAD and Tekla into a unified, queryable format accessible to downstream systems and project stakeholders The platform addresses a structural limitation in how design data flows across construction projects. Although BIM adoption has increased the volume of design information generated, that data typically remains locked within the authoring tools that produced it, making it difficult to connect geometry, specifications and system relationships to cost, schedule or carbon datasets without manual intervention. Speckle normalises output from multiple sources into a format that can be routed into enterprise data infrastructure and queried by analytics or AI systems. Discover what's new in technology for architecture, engineering and construction - read the latest edition of AEC magazine. Subscribe FREE here. Suffolk Construction has deployed Speckle as an automated pipeline feeding its enterprise data lake. Once BIM data is extracted and normalised, Suffolk's systems can tag and categorise elements and apply AI models to assign cost codes automatically. As Murat Melek, Suffolk's Director of Design AI, explains: "Design data is messy, complicated, and dirty. Speckle is key for getting that building information data into our data lake in a way we can actually use. This work used to require manual review of every element across thousands of projects and can now be done in seconds." Speckle uses a versioned data model, which means that when design changes occur, the platform can identify precisely what has changed between versions and trace the downstream implications across interconnected building systems before those changes progress to change orders or RFI cycles. Suffolk has used this capability to quantify cost implications of design decisions earlier in the project lifecycle. At portfolio scale, the normalised historical data allows Suffolk to identify design patterns associated with construction problems, compare versioned models to understand the cost of changes, and surface prefabrication opportunities across projects. The value of such analysis is contingent on data accumulating over time and on the consistency of normalisation across source tools and project types. Jit Kee Chin, EVP and Chief Technology Officer at Suffolk and Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Suffolk Technologies, noted that Speckle has enabled access to model information in a way that supports AI automation across workflows ranging from structural calculations to layout coordination. The investment is indicative of a broader interest among contractors in establishing robust data infrastructure as a precondition for applying machine learning to construction operations, rather than treating AI as a standalone tool. Speckle was co-founded by Dimitrie Stefanescu (pictured above speaking at NXT BLD 2025) and is used by firms including Pomerleau and gbi alongside Suffolk Construction.