Bentley Systems at Global Conference: Predictable Growth Amid AI Focus

On Tuesday, 18 November 2025, Bentley Systems (NASDAQ:BSY) presented at the Global Technology, Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference 2025. The company underscored its consistent performance and strategic growth initiatives, emphasizing the predictability of its annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth and a strong focus on AI integration. While Bentley Systems highlighted the stability of its core business, it also pointed to significant growth opportunities in asset analytics.

Key Takeaways

• Bentley Systems anticipates double-digit ARR growth, driven by its E365 Pure Consumption Program.
• The company is integrating AI to optimize infrastructure design and maintenance, prioritizing user data privacy.
• Bentley is focusing on margin expansion and increasing free cash flow per share by retiring convertible debt.
• Asset analytics is a major growth driver, with plans to expand solutions across all infrastructure assets.
• Bentley Systems aims to continue acquisitions, particularly in asset-specific logic, to enhance its platform.

Financial Results

• ARR Growth: Bentley Systems expects double-digit ARR growth, with enterprise account contracts escalating by about 10% annually. The company also sees 3% ARR growth from small and medium businesses through Virtuosity.
• Consumption Model: Two-thirds of Bentley's business is transitioning enterprise accounts to the E365 consumption subscription model.
• Margin Expansion: The company targets a 100 basis point margin expansion per year through direct sales leverage.
• Free Cash Flow: Bentley has compounded its free cash flow per share at over 14% annually while public and plans to increase this by reducing share count as it retires convertible debt.

Operational Updates

• E365 Pure Consumption Program: The majority of ARR now comes from this program, based on daily product usage with multi-year escalated floors and ceilings negotiated quarterly.
• Focus on Enterprise Accounts: Bentley targets accounts spending $100,000 or more annually, with dedicated Bentley success personnel embedded in each E365 account.
• AI Integration: AI is used to optimize infrastructure costs, with potential savings of around $10,000 per acre compared to traditional design methods. The company focuses on reusing existing designs informed by digital twins.

Future Outlook

• Asset Analytics Growth: Asset analytics is expected to be a major growth driver for 2026 and beyond, with plans to provide solutions for every infrastructure asset.
• Capital Allocation: Bentley plans to continue acquisitions, focusing on asset analytics to enhance its platform.
• Infrastructure Spending: The company anticipates that the successor to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) will be a regular funding bill, primarily supported by the gas tax.
• International Expansion: Bentley is eyeing opportunities in India's 2047 infrastructure program and the Brisbane Olympics in 2032.

Q&A Highlights

• Demand Environment: Infrastructure engineering demand is at an all-time high.
• Consumption Model Expansion: The consumption model could reach 90% for enterprise accounts in the future.
• AI Monetization: Bentley plans to monetize API usage of AI alongside attended consumption.
• IIJA Successor: Focus on surface transportation funding with baseline levels starting at IIJA levels.
• Private Investment: The company expects governments to allow private investment in public infrastructure to accelerate digital adoption.

In conclusion, Bentley Systems remains focused on predictable growth and strategic expansion, driven by its innovative consumption models and AI integration. For a detailed analysis, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Global Technology, Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference 2025:

Matt, Analyst, RBC: At live. All right, making our way through the morning. We've got a really great stretch of companies here, and we're continuing the trend here with Bentley. We've got Greg Bentley, the Executive Chair. I'm so used to calling you CEO, but Founder, Co-founder, and Executive Chair, Greg Bentley. You've been the Executive Chair now, I think it's a little over a year now. Is that about right?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: Yep.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: You're still actively involved. We were just saying, you know, you're still actively involved in the company and capital allocation decisions and broader strategy. You know, could you just give us a sense for, I guess, you know, what are you doing these days at Bentley, and what are you excited about now as you look to the future of the company?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: Matt, by the way, thanks to each of you for your interest and attention here today. As Executive Chairman and being a finance guy by background, I expect to always be involved in capital allocation. The fact is that I enjoy meeting investors. For the time being, I'm hanging on to a role in investor relations as well. Of course, for Bentley's, the majority of our board of directors have taken active interest. I'm the oldest of them. I have had the question, should we expect that there's a transition in ownership of the company from the Bentley family interests to other investors? I say, no, I don't necessarily expect that myself. Since the company went public five years ago, on average, our family's holdings, when we checked, have gone down by about 1% of ownership per year, but still are the majority.

We are very enthusiastic about our opportunities and are very much aligned, therefore, our company's ownership with those of our long-term investors. Of course, what there is to be excited about is that we have a new generation of management, literally our CEO and other C-level folks. We worked hard to recruit and develop people who are in their 40s, in general, and look forward to their generation of stewardship of the company in time.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Yeah. You took my second question. I asked you this yesterday, and you said the answer on family ownership is kind of similar to what it has been at this point. Yeah.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: I don't know otherwise.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Yeah. Yeah. It certainly feels like you guys are, you know, you have built and continue to have long-duration growth and margin expansion opportunities. That certainly has been consistent there. I guess to that point, you guys have delivered very consistent results this year. We always say it's sort of wash, rinse, repeat with Bentley. It's the consistency since your IPO has been remarkable. When you sit back and reflect on, you know, and you've got such a diverse global business with multiple brands and multiple theaters, talk to us about sort of the demand environment right now, just at a very, very high level from your perspective, and then we can drill down on that further.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: What is consistent across the products and the world is that we are the quartermasters, if you like, providing the digital tools for civil engineers, structural engineers, geotechnical engineers, and those who work with them. The end market demand for their work has never been higher. It is literally better each year in terms of their backlogs. There is a resource capacity shortage of engineers in the U.S. The engineering firms, on average, have one out of every nine positions unfilled. The consistency in our business corresponds to the consistency of requirements for infrastructure engineering in the world. Developments on the margin are only emphasizing that. If we just talk about this year, you have the impulse for each country in the world to be more self-sufficient in terms of critical resources and defense, requiring redundant infrastructure expenditures if it came to that.

As we sit here, the Climate Summit in Brazil has appropriately turned its focus realistically to adaptation as being needed for inevitable climate change. That is the work of civil and structural and geotechnical engineers. In general, you know, we had a country in the Western world this year where the lights went out for a couple of years just to remind that quality of life depends on the quality of infrastructure resilience. As it so much ages, there is more work to be done to keep it fit for purpose and so forth. I know we will talk about AI being able to help with that. If we talk about maybe tying in the subject of consistency in our end market with our operating results at Bentley Systems, there is a way in which it coincides.

Our enterprise accounts on our E365 Pure Consumption Program, which is the majority of our ARR now, pay us purely for consumption. We do not have revenue in ARR except as they use our products by the day. Now, of course, they pay us once per year, so there is no change to our cash flows, but there is nothing we account for on a multi-year basis and so forth. These accounts are relying on going digital to make up the resource constraints in engineering capacity and have tended to ask for ceilings on their consumption charges under E365. We have said, yes, we are agreeable to that, provided you will grant us a floor. That began a few years ago and has become the norm. It is not a condition of our contract, but it happens to be the basis of the negotiation now each year in general.

The accounts have said, actually, we have other vendors for whom we lock in a multi-year contract. That is not good because it does not matter what we consume. It may be shelfware for us. We would much rather have consumption. Could we look out and bound our consumption with floors and ceilings over 2026 and 2027 and 2028, perhaps? We have said, this gets to the nature of the ownership and preference of our company. We depend on and are committed to double-digit ARR growth. If the account is willing to escalate the floor and ceiling each year by an amount in double digits, we do not mind having more visibility into the future that that would result in.

That now is the majority of our ARR dollars from E365, which is the majority of our ARR, that there are multi-year escalated floors and ceilings that get negotiated each quarter in the renewals for those accounts. That gives us a glimpse into the expectations. It's a new glimpse each quarter because it's a new set of negotiations, and it's all over the world, and it's all disciplines and end markets for us. It tends to average about 10% that engineering firms say, yes, if you'll bound us at 10% more, spend more each year, we're happy with that, and we'll grant you the 10% escalation in the ceiling. That is, we could be a firm that would say, oh, no, no, we may be giving up some upside. We're in our 44th year. We're happy with double-digit ARR growth.

This gives us kind of a flywheel of predictability, which has been the case this year. Now, I say with that flywheel, on the other hand, that positions us well to be willing and able to take on some more volatile new business opportunities, such as the asset analytics business, where we charge per asset rather than per user or per usage. That is much lumpier because we're competing for big procurements. We also have in our ARR growth the coming and going of ARR that we onboard with acquisitions. Those have become much less predictable as we strategically preferred to focus on the opportunity for asset analytics acquisitions. Those have become episodic and added volatility to the total ARR growth. The ARR growth from the mainstream of our business has become more predictable.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Yeah. I guess, do you envision a point in the future where, I mean, it would somewhat depend on E365 penetration, but what percentage of your business could be consumption in the future? Could it be, maybe it's not 100%, but is it 90%?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: For all the enterprise accounts, about two-thirds of our business, and so far, we're about two-thirds in the process of upgrading them onto the E365 consumption subscription. Previously, they owned perpetual licenses and paid us for subscription on that. We started with the largest accounts, and we're working our way down. We have several years at the current rate remaining to get all of the enterprise accounts. We count an enterprise account as those who spend $100,000 a year or more with us. Those are accounts, engineering organizations of the scale to have central tool smiths who are choosing the tools. With E365, we embed our own people into the company, into the E365 account for the year to help them instill new digital workflows and expand our tools and competitive displacements and so forth.

They have to have a central group that we can work with. That is about at $100,000. We have years ahead of getting around because there is a capacity constraint on our part. We have to provide the staffing to dedicate these experts of ours, civil and structural and geotechnical engineers, into each E365 account. Each has named Bentley success people on their team. We have to upskill people to provide that role. We have years left before we will get all of the enterprise accounts on consumption. Of course, the mix of consumption will start to change and include new types of consumption. That will, I think, be the bulk of our existing business where we charge per user and usage. Then we have this new opportunity, asset analytics, where we charge per asset.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: When we think about the durability of that 10% growth, the question that we often get is, what are some things on the margin that could, IIJA was certainly part of a growth element several years ago. When you think about some of the big moving pieces, whether it's federal funding, permitting reform, asset analytics, what are some of these bigger elements that could be some of that incremental growth beyond that sort of floor and ceiling increase on an annual basis?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: Recall that the 10% I'm talking about there is for the enterprise account mainstay of our business. But we have managed an additional 3% of ARR growth.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: From Virtuosity.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: From SMB, the new prospects for us, because we didn't, we're 93% direct sales. SMB is a new focus for us since IPO. That's providing the other 3% or so. Across the world, governments have greater commitments to infrastructure spending, public works and utilities being the largest end market sector for us, followed by resources. In each of those, the requirements for the reasons of the sort we've been talking about are greater than ever. In the countries of Europe and the U.K. and Germany and at the EU level, new spending commitments and programs. The Middle East, always strong, but stronger than ever. In Asia, Australia has had a slowdown in transport spending, but now with the Brisbane Olympics in 2032, a very strong new program starting.

India is committed to, they say, their developed economy 2047 program, which is mainly a program of infrastructure spending. I might say that speaking of developing economies, we showed some market research that as a country would advance and grow a quintile in GDP per person, the infrastructure engineers double what they spend per year and so forth. That is a source of future growth for us as well. Finally, this notion of critical resource constraints. I suppose you could say, by the way, electrical power is a critical resource. It is not, I think, even so much that the demand for data centers has caused this. Our grids are overstressed and overaged. We have not added new capacity.

Finally, being able to get past the permitting obstacles for both grid expansion, new capacity corridors for transmission, and new mining exploration, those are two major opportunities of ours. Our Seequent subsurface modeling business, which is now more than 20% of our company, the Power Line Systems acquisition, the world's tools for physical design of the transmission and distribution grid, those already are our fastest growing parts of the company and are poised to grow faster. In the case of Power Line Systems, it already has doubled since we acquired it three years ago. I said at the time that there aren't many aspects of our business that could grow by an integer multiple. This is one. The integer so far has been two, but with the opportunity for permitting reform.

Of course, that won't happen immediately because even though in the U.S. we may have permitting reform legislation, that won't mean that the permits are automatically.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: It takes time.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: It takes time. That looks like another opportunity for the future.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: I have to ask, we've been talking about IIJA for years and years and it's set to expire next year. What are the prospects from your perspective on the next iteration of that? What is sort of the kind of the scuttlebutt in the industry on?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: Certainly the engineering firms monitor it very closely. A technical change will be that the IIJA was the first federal infrastructure spending, which went beyond surface transportation to add funding for broadband, grid, and water, because those traditionally have been funded privately or at the state and local level in the U.S. That aspect is unlikely to continue under this administration. However, broadband, grid, and water are abundantly funded at the private level in the U.S. The successor to IIJA will be a regular every five years surface transportation funding bill funded primarily by the gas tax. What is, I think, most gratifying about this is that I think in the U.S., after IIJA, we no longer say the word stimulus after infrastructure. We recognize it is essential for quality of life. There has been a good return on the investment.

We have some infrastructure we can actually be proud of instead of ashamed of in the world. Certainly, electrical capacity is a case in point of something for which there's no substitute. In the replacement surface transportation bill, the discussion is of baseline levels that will start at the IIJA level for surface transportation and go up from there. I think we've learned that infrastructure is a great investment. If I go back to the other countries in the world that I talked about, when we talk about Europe, especially, there could be a concern, maybe in this country too, governments are going to run out of the money. They're not going to run out of their intention and responsibility to provide infrastructure. What about the fiscal capacity?

Of course, the answer to that is there's more than enough private investment that would like to be invested in infrastructure. It's bound to happen. When it does happen in the future, because the impediment now is governments not allowing private investment in public infrastructure, when it does happen in the P3s, for instance, in Canada and Australia, it's always a design, build, operate, maintain concession. The consortia that bid on that are going to win the project and make money because they have a digital twin approach in mind to utilize the engineering designs throughout operations and maintenance as a competitive advantage. That will actually accelerate going digital in infrastructure engineering.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: That's a good segue into AI. I mean, you guys have been focused on AI for years. And digital twin has been a big part of your strategy. How should investors think about how Bentley is leveraging or embedding AI into their platform to enable customers to see even more benefit and advanced models in the future?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: An efficient way to look at that would be to view on our website, our CEO, Nicholas Cumins, keynote last month at our Year in Infrastructure conference, where he spoke about that for an hour and gave some demonstrations. You're right that AI isn't new for us. The digital twins tend to start with reality modeling from overlapping video and a drone. When you process that into an engineering-ready reality mesh over the past decade in our products, you use computer vision AI to recognize and classify the digital components. Our engineers have used our generative components for scripting that can be automated to create and explore a whole universe of design alternatives. In something like water systems operations, using neural networks to locate and predict leaks have all been uses of AI in the past. Now we have AI-native products.

As an example of the additional value they can create, our OpenSite Plus for the simplest of civil engineering problems, a site design. Here we optimize the costs of grading and drainage by running tens of thousands of alternatives. In general, average about $10,000 cheaper per acre than would be the best design that an engineer would be able to do themselves, interactively specifying an alternative and costing it out. If you let AI help with the optimizing, you run the software a zillion more times, but you end up with an improvement in quality of the result. That is a particular unusual case where you can measure the value. In most of infrastructure, this is more complicated, there are more factors. You cannot quite do that. The value produced by AI is comparable, but you cannot quite measure it in the same way.

The greatest advantage that AI is going to bring in infrastructure engineering is to reuse existing designs informed by how well they've performed as tracked through a digital twin during operations and maintenance. That is not something that human engineers are very willing to do the work to do. AI is great at it. Our new Bentley Connect offering, foundation for our Bentley Infrastructure Cloud of ProjectWise, AssetWise, and Syncro, will provide an entry-level opportunity for users to federate and search and query their existing data, because it's their own data that they can use to train their own models or refine the training of models that we provide. In particular, the economics of each product are improved by starting on what's already been designed and proven. The quality will be better and the risk will be low.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Is there an element of a network effect? Because you implied that it's their own models that they're being trained on. But is there a community effect that, if it's some randomized data across customers, that can be sort of a better provide uplifts to the entire platform? Or is there no element to see kind of a network effect?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: We are very clear that our users' data is their data. Intellectual property concerns are the principal caution that engineering executives have about AI. We do not have any of our users' data. It is their data. We will provide the tools for them to train AI models on that data, because it is all in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud for their own competitive advantage. To the extent the data that an owner, a Department of Transportation or an airport has rights to that data, they will be able to use that to train a model specific to those assets. It is only if they would contribute it to be used in training that we would do. We even have a particular pedigree that we can track what data we have used.

It is our attitude that by virtue of Bentley Infrastructure Cloud and ProjectWise, which has captured the engineering projects for most infrastructure engineers for their lifetime, that that can be and should be an advantage to them and their own development of their asset analytics opportunities themselves for future projects to reuse that data and to provide with asset analytics the operations and maintenance logic and optimization for the assets that they have designed.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: From a monetization perspective, because the question is, it's great that you guys are focused on adding more AI capabilities. Ultimately, it should drive higher consumption over time. Is that sort of the premise on providing some of these extra features?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: It will not drive more consumption per user per day, will it? Because the user will get more done in a given day. The usage it will drive is what I call API usage. AI used through an API where our enterprise accounts are investing in AI. They are not investing in AI to replace their engineering calculation tools. They would not take the risk of doing that. They do not need to do that. They will surround applications like ours with agents that help a user, an engineer, get more done without having to sit there in front of the screen while it occurs. That is an example, as in the example I provided before, that will greatly increase the total consumption. We will end up monetizing not only attended consumption as we do now, but also the API consumption.

We're now working with our users for how that would be fair. In the meantime, we're encouraging as much of that API consumption as they will do, because we will be monetizing it in the future.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: I have about seven more questions, and we have four minutes to go here. We'll try to do some of these quickly. I mean, you mentioned asset analytics earlier. It really does seem like a driver for 2026 and beyond. How should we think about asset analytics contributing to the model? It's a little, like you said, it's a little different pricing mechanism, but.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: A digital twin makes sense. All of the engineering logic that the owner pays for only gets used traditionally once during the project delivery. The original, after construction, it's abandoned. Whereas the structural and the civil and mechanical logic should be used to optimize the maintenance of the asset over time and make sure it's still safe and only do the necessary maintenance. Spending less to do only the necessary maintenance is the driver that makes digital twins cost nothing or negative and is an opportunity for everyone. If you had to start with a new project for a digital twin, that can be a long sales cycle. With asset analytics, you can have an instant-on digital twin with the result of a drone flight, for instance, for a cell tower.

Or in the case of roadway miles, our Blinksee uses AI on dashcam data that's available anyway every day from the fleets that are transiting the roads to recognize what needs maintenance. You can turn on a digital twin immediately with asset analytics. We use the term because we charge per asset per mile or per asset per year. There will end up being an asset analytics solution for every infrastructure asset over time. We would like to have our platform be the foundation for the cloud services to do that and to have the engineering firms be adding their own trained models, their own engineers who won't need to spend the time they've been spending and instead can apply themselves to optimizing the maintenance and to add their own bundled services to our application layer.

Our capital allocation priority for the past couple of years has been to do acquisitions that add special asset-specific logic to our platform. We haven't done one yet this year, but we expect to conclude the year having succeeded in our aspiration for really owning the space for asset analytics.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Maybe just from a broader capital allocation perspective, it's been a while since you've done Seequent and Power Line Systems. I mean, you're actively involved in capital allocation decisions right now, especially from an M&A perspective. What are the prospects of a larger deal similar to those two priorities?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: I say that we Bentley Systems would like to continue and expect to continue to be a consolidator. This example of asset analytics is a case in point. There are many worthwhile startups that have focused in particular asset types. To have a whole broad platform for the digital twin is beyond what they should be working on. Putting those together is our capital allocation priority for the moment. We have many good prospects underway.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Maybe just to close, you've been involved with Bentley for over 40 years. When you think of big moonshot or, boy, 10 years from now, that would be an audacious goal for Bentley. What are some of the big dream-to-dream moonshots that you think about for Bentley?

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: The opportunity is in asset operations and maintenance to use the engineering knowledge and intelligence to optimize and spend only what's necessary on maintenance, to monitor with continuous surveying, continued safety, and to improve the performance and lifetime and fitness for purpose. That, fortunately, is the vision of our new management generation. It is orthogonal to an opportunity in addition to our existing per user business. This per asset business is our destiny.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Yeah, that's.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: Foreseeable.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Yeah. Yeah. The S curves of growth seem it's got some duration to it.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: We're going to reboot the original S curve for Bentley Systems in this asset analytics opportunity, I think.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: Doing it in a very profitable way from a margin expansion.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: I go so far as to say it's what we should do, because our business is otherwise so predictable and markets are so stable and so forth. We should be taking on some risk to go for this. Our partner, Google, is providing a lot of the data needed, and it's very exciting.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: With all that said, you still think from a predictability standpoint, we should think about kind of 100 basis points of margin expansion despite some of these investments.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: I say about margin expansion when you have it ingrained that we get more efficient by 100 basis points per year, and everyone expects that. We accomplish most of it through our scale leverage of indirect sales, if you see what I mean. If you had indirect sales, you spend the same amount on go-to-market every year as a percentage. With direct sales, our enterprises spend 10% more, and our cost of going to market is 3% or 4% in our annual raises. That falls into the bottom line. When you have that ingrained, you do not try to renegotiate it every year, because there is always new opportunity, and we are better simply to stick to this. We have managed to compound our free cash flow per share while public for the five years at 14% plus.

We expect to be able to increase that next year with reducing our share count a bit as we retire our convertible debt. When you do that, you compound the basis for valuation doubling every five years, as we have done, and probably as we have done for 40 years. I hope to do so. It is our plan and my responsibility for the future to make sure it happens.

Matt, Analyst, RBC: From all of us at RBC, thanks again, Greg, and thanks, Eric, for supporting us. Cool.

Greg Bentley, Executive Chair, Bentley Systems: Sure.

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