The last time your team sent someone to a site to verify as-built conditions, ask yourself: how much did that visit cost? The flight or drive. The hours. The delay in getting an answer back to the client or the model team. Now multiply that across every project you ran last year.
For most AECO firms in Canada, site documentation is still one of the most expensive and least efficient parts of project delivery. Tape measures. 2D drawings. Photos that tell half the story. Handover packages that are outdated by the time they're printed.
A growing number of firms — including several in your competitive set — have started solving this problem with digital twins. Not as a pilot project or an innovation initiative. As standard operating procedure.
Here's what the research says, why it's happening now, and what it means for how AECO firms in Canada win and deliver work in 2026 and beyond.
The construction industry has a well-documented productivity problem. According to McKinsey's ongoing research into construction productivity, global construction productivity grew at only 0.4% annually between 2000 and 2022 — a fraction of the gains seen in manufacturing and the broader economy. One of the core reasons: information stays siloed, inaccurate, and difficult to act on.
Source: McKinsey & Company, 'Delivering on Construction Productivity Is No Longer Optional,' 2024
Rework is where this plays out most painfully. The Construction Industry Institute and McKinsey have both documented that rework accounts for 5–15% of total project budget in a typical construction project — much of it traceable to inaccurate or incomplete documentation of existing conditions.
Source: Construction Industry Institute / McKinsey; InspectMind, 'True Cost of Construction Rework,' 2024
When as-builts are wrong — or when a project team discovers a discrepancy between what the drawings show and what exists in the field — someone goes back to site. That visit is often unplanned, unbudgeted, and unavoidable.
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5–15% of project budget lost to rework Construction Industry Institute / McKinsey |
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0.4% annual productivity growth in construction 2000–2022 McKinsey, 2024 |
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0.5% of global megaprojects finish on time, on budget, on scope Flyvbjerg & Gardner, 2024 / EY Canada |
The problem is particularly acute at project handover. Facility managers routinely inherit documentation packages that were outdated the moment the project closed — and spend years working around the gaps.
"When infrastructure projects adopt modern digital tools, those initiatives become much more likely to meet timelines, cost targets, and other meaningful stakeholder benefits throughout planning and delivery."
— EY Canada, 'Digital Twins and AI Powering Canadian Infrastructure,' 2025
The shift from traditional documentation to digital twins isn't theoretical anymore. The market data makes that clear.
$64.9B → $155B
Digital twin in construction market projected to grow from USD $64.9B in 2025 to $155B by 2030 (CAGR of 17%)
Source: Research and Markets, Digital Twin in Construction Market Report, 2025
That growth isn't being driven by technology vendors. It's being driven by owners, operators, and regulators who are starting to expect digital deliverables as part of standard project delivery. 67% of building owners and facility managers already report having a digital twin of at least one asset — compared to only 52% of AEC firms implementing them on projects.
Source: Hexagon, Digital Twin Industry Report, 2024 (660 global executives across 11 industries)
That gap matters. When the people who commission and pay for buildings expect a digital twin at closeout, and the firms building them aren't producing one, that's a proposal differentiator — or a vulnerability, depending on which side of the gap you're on.
In Canada specifically, the momentum is accelerating at the infrastructure level. The 2024 launch of the Canadian Infrastructure Council and the federal government's Construction Sector Digitalization and Productivity Challenge program both signal that digital adoption in construction is moving from optional to expected.
Source: EY Canada, 'Digital Twins and AI Powering Canadian Infrastructure,' 2025
"As Canada embarks on a new chapter of nation-building infrastructure projects, public and private stakeholders should consider digital twins — and AI more broadly — to strengthen momentum."
— EY Canada, 2025
The use cases that are gaining the most traction in Canadian AECO firms aren't the futuristic ones. They're practical, project-level applications that solve problems teams are dealing with every week.
Instead of sending a team member to verify conditions — or worse, discovering a discrepancy after concrete has been poured — firms are capturing a Matterport scan and sharing navigable, measurable access to site conditions with their entire team from any device. The model is accurate to ±20mm at 10 metres and accessible remotely without any specialized software.
For renovation and retrofit projects especially, inaccurate as-builts are a constant source of rework and dispute. A Matterport scan captures the physical reality of a space — complete with automatic floor plans, measurements, and point cloud data ready for Revit and AutoCAD — in under 30 minutes. That's a record you can stand behind in a dispute.
Documenting a construction site at regular intervals creates a time-stamped, navigable record of every stage of the build. When a question arises about when a condition changed, what was concealed behind a wall, or what the site looked like before a scope change, the record exists. Firms using this approach report measurable reductions in disputed change orders.
This is where the value compounds over time. Delivering a digital twin at project closeout gives the building owner and facility management team a navigable, always-accessible reference for every space, system, and asset in the building. 65% of building owners recognize the high value of digital twins — which means offering this at closeout is increasingly a proposal differentiator, not a nice-to-have.
Source: Hexagon, Digital Twin Industry Report, 2024
Clients and owners no longer need to physically visit a site to understand progress. A Matterport digital twin gives them self-serve, navigable access to the project from any device — reducing the number of client-driven site visits and improving confidence in project status without additional overhead for the project team.
Digital twin technology has existed for over a decade. What's changed in the last two to three years is the convergence of three factors that have brought the barrier to entry low enough for mid-size AECO firms to adopt it without a dedicated innovation team or a large capital investment.
The most time-consuming element of traditional documentation was the manual processing — measuring, drafting, and producing floor plans from raw site data. Matterport's AI now generates accurate floor plans, room measurements, and space labels automatically from every scan. What used to take days of drafting time takes minutes of cloud processing.
For AECO firms already using Autodesk Construction Cloud, the integration question has been answered. Matterport scans can be published directly into ACC projects, and point cloud exports flow natively into Autodesk ReCap and Revit. For firms running ACC workflows, there's no new platform to adopt — just a new layer of physical data feeding into the tools they already use.
The Pro3 camera uses LiDAR technology to capture indoor and outdoor spaces at up to 100 metres range, in under 20 seconds per scan, in full sunlight — capabilities the previous generation couldn't match. What once required a terrestrial laser scanner costing tens of thousands of dollars can now be done with a camera that fits in a backpack.
Despite the momentum, the Hexagon research reveals an important gap in the AECO sector specifically: AEC firms lag behind other industries in digital twin adoption, with only 52% implementing them on projects — the lowest of all sectors surveyed.
Source: Hexagon, Digital Twin Industry Report, 2024
That gap creates a window. Firms that establish a digital twin workflow now — and make it a standard part of their project delivery and proposal process — will have a defensible advantage over competitors who are still doing manual documentation.
The firms winning larger, more complex work in Canada are already making this part of how they present themselves in proposals. The ability to offer digital twin delivery at closeout, to provide remote stakeholder access throughout a project, and to produce defensible as-built records that can stand up in a dispute — these are becoming RFP differentiators, not innovation experiments.
"Despite documented digital twin benefits — including improved efficiency, better problem-solving tools, reduced risk and 80% of companies reporting a reduction in carbon emissions — the fragmented nature of building projects presents challenges to adoption. By starting with appropriate pilot projects and establishing robust data integration frameworks, AECO organisations can bridge the perception gap."
— PBC Today, citing Hexagon Digital Twin Industry Report, 2024
The research and the industry practitioners who have successfully adopted digital twins consistently point to the same starting principle: start small, with a clear end goal in mind. The most common failure mode is trying to build an enterprise digital twin program before demonstrating value on a single project.
The practical starting point for most AECO firms looks like this:
The Canadian AECO firms pulling ahead on this aren't the ones with the biggest innovation budgets. They're the ones who decided to make one change to their documentation workflow and built from there.
Digital twins are no longer a technology story. They're a competitive and operational story. The clients commissioning your projects — whether they're institutional owners, developers, or government agencies — are increasingly expecting them. The firms winning work against you are increasingly offering them. And the tools required to deliver them are more accessible, more affordable, and more connected to your existing Autodesk workflow than at any point in their history.
The question for most Canadian AECO firms isn't whether digital twins will become a standard part of project delivery. It's whether they'll be ahead of that shift or catching up to it.
17% CAGR
Digital twin adoption in construction is growing at 17% annually — the sector is moving from early adopters to mainstream
Source: Research and Markets, Digital Twin in Construction Market Forecast 2025–2030
Sources & Further Reading
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A digital twin is a navigable, measurable digital record of a physical space, created by capturing site conditions and keeping that record accessible to the project team throughout the project lifecycle. In AECO work it typically means a 3D capture of existing or in-progress conditions, complete with floor plans, measurements and point cloud data that feed into BIM tools.
A BIM model represents design intent, meaning what the building is supposed to be. A digital twin captures physical reality, meaning what actually exists on site. The two work together: the twin verifies conditions against the model and provides a defensible record of what was built.
The Pro3 camera captures at ±20mm accuracy at 10 metres, with a range of up to 100 metres, indoors and outdoors, in full sunlight. Each scan takes under 20 seconds. That accuracy is sufficient for as-built documentation, condition verification and design work on most renovation and retrofit projects.
Yes. Scans publish directly into ACC projects, and e57 point cloud exports flow natively into Autodesk ReCap, Revit and AutoCAD. For firms already running ACC workflows there is no new platform to adopt, only a new layer of physical data feeding into existing tools.
Research from the Construction Industry Institute and McKinsey puts rework at 5 to 15% of total project budget on a typical construction project, much of it traceable to inaccurate or incomplete documentation of existing conditions.
A full scan of a space, including automatic floor plans, measurements and point cloud data ready for Revit and AutoCAD, can be completed in under 30 minutes. AI generates the floor plans and measurements automatically, replacing what used to be days of manual drafting.
Increasingly, yes. 67% of building owners and facility managers report having a digital twin of at least one asset, compared with only 52% of AEC firms implementing them on projects. That gap means offering a digital twin at closeout is becoming a proposal differentiator rather than an innovation extra.
Start with one active project rather than an enterprise program. Choose a project with a renovation component or complex owner reporting requirements, scan at key milestones rather than continuously, connect the output to your existing ACC and Revit workflow, deliver the twin at closeout, and use that first project as your case study.
Both are options. SolidCAD supplies Matterport hardware for firms building in-house capability, and also offers scanning services for firms that prefer to avoid the capital investment or only need capture on specific projects.