Next week, NXT BLD turns ten. The event runs 13–14 May at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, and Martyn Day has just published a year-by-year retrospective and a companion piece on the eleven themes that will define this year's programme. Both are worth reading in full.
I first attended NXT BLD in 2020 - the virtual edition during Covid. Over the years since I've come back as an attendee, a sponsor, an exhibitor, and now, for the second year, as co-host. This year I'm MC for more than 30 sessions across the two days.
Martyn's retrospective tracks the evoluton well: The 2017 event was about looking past BIM towards VR, AR, and early signs of robotics. By 2019 Spot Mini was on stage. 2021 was Greg Schleusner from HOK calling for open data flows and connected tools. 2023 was Aaron Perry's "Future Design Software Specification" - still the clearest articulation of what comes next that I've seen. 2025 was the year BIM 2.0 became real, with Arcol, Qonic, Hypar, Autodesk, Snaptrude and Motif sharing a stage for the first time.
The 2026 programme reads like the year all of those threads converge. Agentic BIM as a serious topic rather than a slogan. A first-of-its-kind track on autonomous MEP and structural design. Real talk on "applications on demand" - what it means for vendor differentiation when firms can spin up their own tools in days rather than wait years for them. The launch of an open-source agentic BIM data lake stack that, if it lands as advertised, changes the substrate question Martyn raised in his AEC Magazine cover story last month.
The eleven themes Martyn outlines are the right list. I'll be moderating sessions across most of them, and the questions I want to bring on stage are the ones I've been working through here in writing all year - what BIM 3.0 actually looks like when you strip away the marketing, where the lifecycle data layer actually sits, what the trust gap means for adoption, and whether the BIM 2.0 challengers and the agentic-first crowd are converging or diverging.
If you're heading to London next week, find me. If you're not, more soon - I'll be writing it up over the weeks that follow.