The US construction market does not like being told what to do. We do not have a federal mandate forcing digital standards onto projects, and we are not likely to get one soon. So when people ask me where the industry is heading, I do not point at a US policy. I point across the Atlantic.
Markets that adopt early tell you what the laggards will do later. And on the question of digital building information, the UK started a full decade before we did, not by waiting for the market to come around, but by mandating it.
01 / The forcing functionA mandate, then a curve
In 2016 the UK government required BIM, structured digital building information, on its centrally procured public projects. Building on the ISO 19650 series of standards, the rule was simple: if you want to work on government jobs, your project data has to be digital and structured. Not photos. Not loose drawings. A coordinated digital record.
What happened next is the part worth paying attention to. The mandate covered public work, but the practice did not stay there. Once the largest contractors built the capability to win government jobs, they carried it into their private work too. The standard became the default. And the adoption numbers tracked it the whole way.
From 13% to 73% in a decade. That is not a niche tool finding a few enthusiasts. That is an entire national industry changing how it works, pulled forward by a requirement and then sustained by the fact that, once you have it, you do not go back.
02 / The US versionSame destination, no map
The US is on the same road. The difference is we are getting there without the mandate, which means slower, messier, and driven by private pressure instead of public policy.
Look at who is pushing. Owners want a digital record of the asset they are paying for. General contractors want coordination and fewer clashes. Insurers and sureties want documented proof of what was built before they take on the risk. Lenders want milestones they can verify before they release a draw. None of that is a government rule. It is the market arriving at the same conclusion the UK mandate forced a decade earlier: the industry runs better on structured digital information than on paper and memory.
The mandate was the UK's shortcut. The US is taking the long way to the same place.
So if you accept that the destination is the same, the useful question becomes: what does the UK's head start reveal about the road ahead? And the most important thing it reveals is not a success story. It is a gap that adoption alone never closed.
03 / The gap the data exposesWe solved capture. We never solved "so what."
Here is what a decade of digital adoption, on either side of the Atlantic, has actually produced. We are capturing more information about our jobsites than ever before. Scanners, drones, 360 cameras, the phone in every super's pocket. The volume of data about what physically exists on a site is staggering, and it grows every year.
And almost none of it gets used.
The scan gets delivered as a file. A beautiful, accurate, dense file. And it sits on a drive. It does not confirm whether the work matches the drawings. It does not back a pay application. It does not settle the as-built versus as-designed argument that shows up in every closeout meeting. We solved the capture problem and barely touched the "so what" problem.
That gap, between what the drawings say and what actually exists in the field, is where the cost lives. It is where disputes start, where money gets stuck, where trust between an owner, a GC, and a trade quietly erodes. And the record that should close it is usually a photo buried in someone's phone or a point cloud nobody downstream can read.
The UK's curve proves adoption is coming to the US whether we mandate it or not. What the curve also proves is that adoption by itself does not close the gap. Capturing the data was never the hard part. Making it mean something, turning it into a verified, structured, auditable record that every stakeholder can actually use, is the part the whole industry is still missing.
That is the part VIA is built to solve.