The Infrastructure Podcast Infrastructure's AI realities with Tom Bartley
In today's podcast we delve into the world of Artificial Intelligence to explore the future of infrastructure and technology - and the people reshaping both.
To do this we’re diving into one of the biggest - and most urgent - challenges facing the built environment: namely how we manage and maintain our ageing infrastructure in a world of rising costs, growing risks, and tightening resources.
Across the UK and beyond, roads, bridges, railways and public assets are showing their age. Traditional methods of inspection and maintenance are expensive, reactive, and often too slow to really move the dial and catch up decades of under-investment.
But there’s a quiet revolution underway - powered by artificial intelligence - that’s potentially changing how we understand and care for the structures we rely on every day.
And my guest today is someone right at the heart of that transformation.
Tom Bartley is Director of Civil Infrastructure at AI scale-up Mind Foundry and brings a deep understanding of both the engineering and the technology worlds. With past roles at WSP and Jacobs - and as co-founder of Barbal and dotBuiltEnvironment, he's spent his career championing digital transformation across planning, design, and delivery.
Now at Mind Foundry - a company born out of Oxford University research - he’s working to deploy responsible AI that helps asset owners predict risk, extend the life of critical infrastructure, and make better decisions, faster.
So let’s find out and explore how AI is being used on projects like HS2, ask what’s holding the sector back from adopting innovation, and see if Tom can convince us why human-AI collaboration - not replacement - is the key to building smarter, safer systems.
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