A recent conversation with Evan Troxel for an upcoming podcast got me thinking about some ironies in the current BIM 2.0 landscape that don't get aired enough.
The first is structural. Every BIM 2.0 player integrates with Revit in some form. Tools working in early design push outputs to Revit; others open Revit files to pull from them. Some — Skema and Hypar among them — were designed from the outset to work in close relationship with Revit, doing a significant portion of the work in newer, smarter ways before handing off. More recently, Laiout released a round-trip Revit workflow for their AI layout tool. At the other end, a growing number of tools produce documentation using AI — again, sitting on top of the underlying Revit model.
BIM 2.0 is largely a set of tools built around the system it was supposed to replace.
The second irony is the gap. There is one phase of the design process that BIM 2.0 has largely not addressed: detailed and developed design. This is the critical stage where everything comes together — where high levels of detail meet sustained creative judgment, and where the decisions that shape everything downstream get made. Without this phase being properly addressed, the data required to automate documentation simply isn't there.
The third irony follows: some of the biggest productivity gains across the whole process are available in the documentation phase — yet the industry continues to produce 2D documentation. BIM 2.0 is chasing automation in a phase that still outputs drawings in the same format as 1974.
I should be clear that none of this is accidental. I've written separately about the structural Catch-22 that explains why the BIM 2.0 cohort has converged on exactly this pattern — the same market dynamics that make Revit integration commercially necessary also make it self-reinforcing. The companies aren't missing the irony; they're navigating a genuine constraint. That doesn't make the ironies less real.
Of the current BIM 2.0 players, one stands out for taking a different approach to the missing middle: Qonic. Their founding assumption was that attacking detailed and developed design — the hardest phase — from day one was the right foundation to build on. Last week they released something that makes that bet look increasingly well placed. More on that shortly.