AECCafe Industry Predictions for 2025 – Chaos

By Vladimir Koylazov, Head of Innovation, Chaos

Vladimir Koylazov

In 2025, the AEC industry will see the culmination of several trends that have been building over the past few years.

To start, architects and designers will see huge improvements around more efficient building techniques. For decades, they have been striving to improve efficiency, but the process has been slow on the design side, as designers need to spend time fully realizing their creations, then send them off for a full energy analysis. It’s a slow, iterative process that can require multiple rounds of analysis, all of which take time and money.

These inefficiencies are improving. Last year, Chaos launched Enscape Impact, a tool that can determine the energy efficiency of a building during the initial design phase. Designers receive energy efficiency data they need as part of their creative stage and have the power and freedom to make changes that can directly impact the project’s overall energy efficiency. This leads to more cost-effective projects and more energy efficient buildings, and will ultimately help to address escalating concern over sustainability.

I predict that the need to build more sustainable, future-proof cities will be one of the most talked about trends in the coming year and could help the industry move in new directions. There will be a continued push to make cities more resilient and climate friendly through improvements to construction and climate-proofing new and existing builds. Changes to improve sustainability will be gradual, but urgency will build as temperatures continue to rise and natural disasters cause devastation around the world. Tools that can help are on the way, and tech companies, including Chaos, are focusing heavily on the need. As the archviz community unites around the evolving needs, tools will become more readily available.

Another key prediction for 2025 is the evolution of AI. When AI first started impacting global business, there was an understandable fear that it would destroy jobs and industries. While it has unquestionably caused disruption, we now better understand what it can and cannot do, and are able to create applications that are optimized for specific audiences. For archviz users, the benefits of AI have been fairly extraordinary, and we are still at the very early stages of what generative AI can bring to their work. We currently have tools that can make images more realistic or shorten the creation process, and in the next year and beyond, we’ll see generative AI help designers change their entire workflow. They will be able to use AI to turn their concept into a fully realized project with photorealistic images and digital humans to bring it to life. Sketches will become images, and images will become animations. Creators will have more options than ever before, and be able to build new workflows and pipelines that fit their individual needs.

We will also see a continued push toward making file formats like OpenUSD universal, which will encourage users to stick with the tools they know and prefer. The barriers between different aspects of design will continue to fall, as tools like our own Chaos Envision make it possible to do things like import large CAD files and create large, photorealistic scenes.

Ultimately, creating an accessible design ecosystem, with options many didn’t think possible, will remain hugely important and entirely possible. In 2025, we’ll see the culmination of several technologies and the emergence of new ones. Stay tuned— it’s going to be a transformative year in AEC!

Tags: ChatGPT AEC 2025, climate resilience, energy tools, generative AI, OpenUSD., sustainability

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Monday, January 20th, 2025 at 12:06 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.