Bentley’s COO James Lee on AI for Infrastructure

What the COO Overseas — and Why

Long before James Lee joined Bentley Systems as chief operating officer, he was building an impressive track record of driving growth and transformation in the technology sector. With key roles at industry giants such as Google, SAP, and HP, along with a wealth of experience in international business, artificial intelligence, and other fast-moving fields, he became accustomed to wearing multiple hats.  

 Bentley COO James Lee discusses how AI augments, rather than replaces, engineers — framing the company’s roadmap for asset analytics and open ecosystems. Image source Bentley Systems.

As Bentley COO, Lee relishes the opportunity to guide operations on multiple fronts. He leads Bentley’s cross-functional planning and execution, overseeing operations in China, Japan, and portfolio development, including growth initiatives such as Bentley Asset Analytics. In more specific roles, Lee guides business strategy, mergers and acquisition activities, partnerships, data security, commercial models, and global technical support.

“I have a wide portfolio of activities,” said Lee in an interview with Cadalyst at Bentley Systems’ 2025 Year in Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards. “The three main areas under that portfolio — China, Japan, and asset analytics — all have a commonality. They adhere to the culture that Bentley has created, which is, hardworking people who treat users like family.”

Lee’s Path to Bentley’s AI Push

Lee has intentionally blended formal education and practical business experience in developing his skill sets. After earning a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of British Columbia and a diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music, he started his career at Hewlett Packard, managing supply chain consulting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for four years. He then returned to school to earn an MBA at Harvard Business School.

Equipped with an MBA and practical business experience, Lee joined SAP, a leading enterprise applications software developer, and served in a variety of different roles for 12 years, ranging from product management to operational strategy. As COO for SAP Ariba and Fieldglass and COO and general manager of sales for SAP Greater China, he broadened his international experience.

In 2020, Lee joined Google, where he served as the general manager of Startups and AI at Google Cloud. In that role, he helped build the Google Cloud Platform into a prominent AI development platform, and also led Google Cloud's Strategic Initiatives for the Americas.

“I had the opportunity to get a front seat in the whole AI revolution,” said Lee. “It focused on driving adoption of Google large language models, agentic services, and their compute infrastructure.”

Bentley’s Infrastructure Priorities

Fast-forwarding to January 2025, when Lee joined Bentley Systems, he found an exciting opportunity to join Bentley’s leadership team and help guide its ever-growing presence in infrastructure work around the world. Bentley’s global impact was a key factor in attracting Lee to the company. “We create value for society,” he said.

In addition to the company’s rich history in helping engineers design critical infrastructure products, Lee has witnessed a growing need to help infrastructure professionals maintain and preserve existing infrastructure. Coupled with a shortage of engineering professionals, the growing focus on preserving existing infrastructure is requiring industry firms to apply new technologies such as AI to do more with less. This puts Bentley in a prominent position to help firms manage existing assets.

“If you zoom in on the operation and maintenance side, this is an opportunity that we find very exciting. In addition to new infrastructure projects, there are many existing infrastructures in the world that need to be maintained and retrofitted. The potential to work with asset owners and help them maintain and retrofit those existing infrastructure assets is massive.”

Asset Analytics to Decisions

To deal with the growth of asset management, Lee is helping Bentley develop asset analytics, combining multiple technologies and applying AI to help analyze burgeoning amounts of data. “This demonstrates our ability to take many different data sources — satellite imagery, dash cam, mapping, and other data — feed it into an AI model, then produce asset condition insights.”

These data-driven insights can help asset owners perform more predictive maintenance, rather than reactive maintenance, said Lee. “[With predictive maintenance,] asset owners can address issues before a crisis happens. They're able to see the conditions of their assets, and do maintenance before something breaks down,” he noted.

Blyncsy: Roadway Detections

As an example, Lee cited the achievements of Blyncsy, a Bentley company that performs asset analytics on pavement, signing, roadway markings, and other infrastructure elements. By applying machine learning algorithms and image processing to dash-cam imagery, Blyncsy can automatically detect where and when infrastructure elements such as pavement need maintenance.

Blyncsy performs asset analytics to automatically detect where and when infrastructure elements such as pavement need maintenance. Image source: Bentley Systems. Click image to enlarge.

Where AI Helps Engineers Today

Lee sees numerous other opportunities to apply AI in infrastructure work, which also attracted him to Bentley. “I started looking at geospatial AI, robotics, and other related areas, and a lot of that research led me to Bentley. As I considered how we can take the intelligence of AI and bring it to the physical world, with design, construction, and asset maintenance, that became a fascination for me.”

A key Bentley AI objective is to help engineers and designers work more efficiently in tackling heavy workloads. In his role, Lee is determined to keep the company grounded in supporting customers with their needs, helping them grow their capabilities, maintain data security, and address skepticism of AI and other technologies.

“Bentley is a company founded by engineers for engineers, so it has very deep knowledge on how to design, build, and operate infrastructure,” said Lee. “Meanwhile, Bentley has also been at the forefront of thinking: ‘How do you actually capitalize on this AI trend?’ If you look at the sheer number of engineers, we're not keeping up with the demand of work. The goal of AI and automation is not to replace engineers, but complement the work that they're doing.”

As evidence, Lee sees the next generation of AI applications already impacting engineering workflows. Bentley’s OpenSite+, which employs AI to streamline design of building sites, enables designers to create, revise, and interact with design models through natural language methods. Similar AI tools are being introduced in other design environments, such as OpenUtilities Substation+, a new application that brings digital twin and AI-powered capabilities to substation design, and SYNCHRO+, for enhanced 4D modeling. AI enhancements are also coming to Bentley’s existing engineering applications, such as OpenRoads Designer and OpenRail Designer for model-based road and rail design.

“These tools enable you to do fast iterations and generate contextual data, applying what you've done in the past, engineering algorithms, and projects in specific constraints. They help you design, simulate, and model different scenarios.”

Trust and Data Governance

Along with the vast potential for AI, Lee is keenly aware of the need to maintain data security and protection. “Trustworthy AI is very top of mind for us,” he said. “We promote the concept that ‘user data are always user data.’” To maintain that philosophy, Bentley follows an “opt in” and not “opt out” approach for using customer data, noted Lee. “We explicitly ask for permission to use their data to train our models.”

Another key to trustworthy AI is contextual devising of the large language models, according to Lee. “You have to make sure you have the right engineering project, environmental and institutional data, to train the model, so that it's actually useful. That's a passionate area for me.”

How Lee’s Responsibilities Connect

With the diverse nature of Lee’s role, one might wonder how he manages so many different areas and also stays connected with industry trends. Managing international business operations while also contemplating how to employ trustworthy AI, maintain solid customer support, and consider various commercial implications could seem like vastly divergent areas. But Lee sees them all tied together.

“There is a theme behind these areas. I think about the starting point as: ‘What is our strategy? What are we trying to achieve and how are we trying to grow the business? And then from there, where do the investments have to go into growth of the business? And from that point of view, everything ultimately connects to one another — how we continue to stay relevant. And, with technical support, how we continue to delight customers. So it's not by chance that these things are under the COO umbrella. There's a high degree of synergy across these different functions.”

Cesium + iTwin: Why it Matters

Looking ahead, Lee sees even more need for new approaches to infrastructure problem solving, including partnering with customers and developers. “It's about learning and experimentation. This is a whole new environment.”

Lee cited Bentley’s merger with Cesium, a developer of 3D geospatial applications, as an example of forward-looking partnerships. Cesium provides an open platform for software developers, and its 3D Tiles standard has been widely adopted by numerous enterprises, governments, and developers. The combination of Cesium and iTwin enables developers to seamlessly align 3D geospatial data with engineering, subsurface, IoT, reality, and enterprise data to create realistic digital twins.

Integration of Cesium with the iTwin Platform enables more interactive design review processes. Image source: Bentley Systems.

“We're trying to do this blend of the built and natural environments,” said Lee. “As we do that, we ask: ‘How can we encourage developers to start using Cesium in ways that can help the infrastructure side? Then how can infrastructure professionals leverage developer resources in new ways?’ There's this incredible ecosystem that's being built. Bringing in AI, Cesium, subsurface data, and then it will trickle into all the asset analytics and other applications. It's really cool.”

Cool, fascinating, exciting — words that capture James Lee’s perspective on helping address infrastructure challenges as Bentley COO.

***

 

 

 

Searching for more information about Architecture, Infrastructure, and Construction? 

Click here!