How GenAI Is Helping Engineers Spot Overdesign in Capital Projects

Nearly 40% of large capital projects run over budget, often by a wide margin. That’s according to Boston Consulting Group’s own analysis, and if you’ve worked anywhere near a major infrastructure build, it probably won’t surprise you.

What might surprise you is where most of that cost gets locked in. It isn’t the construction site. It’s the design phase, months or years before anyone breaks ground.

The Problem Nobody Owns

Up to 80% of a project’s lifecycle cost is set during design, while only around a fifth can realistically be influenced later through better process efficiency. Once specifications, tolerances, and materials are chosen, the cost is effectively baked in.

The trouble is that overengineering rarely comes from one bad decision. It builds up gradually: a safety factor added here, a premium material specified there, a tolerance tightened “just in case” somewhere else. Individually, each choice looks reasonable. Together, across thousands of drawings on a large energy or infrastructure project, they can add millions to the bill without improving safety or performance at all. Because no single team is usually responsible for challenging the design as a whole, this kind of value leakage tends to go unnoticed until the budget review.

Why This Matters for Scotland’s Energy Build-Out

This lands close to home for us. As Scotland’s offshore wind and wider renewables pipeline grows, the pressure to deliver capital-intensive projects on budget and on time is only going to increase. Every megawatt of new capacity depends on getting the engineering right the first time, because retrofitting an over-specified design later is far more expensive than catching it on paper.

We’ve seen this challenge from the inside through our work with Xi Engineering, where we helped modernise seismic impact assessment for clean energy projects, digitising a process that used to depend heavily on manual expert review. It’s exactly the kind of engineering bottleneck that generative AI is now starting to solve at scale.

What This Means for Capital-Intensive Clients

For anyone running large-scale sustainability and net zero projects, whether that’s energy infrastructure, grid upgrades, or offshore wind, the opportunity is the same: catching costly overdesign while it’s still cheap to fix, rather than after the concrete has been poured.

This is where our AI consulting and digital strategy work come together. Digitising engineering review, as we did with Xi Engineering, lays the groundwork. Bringing GenAI into that process is the next logical step, and it’s one we’re increasingly building into how we help clients in energy and infrastructure design smarter from day one.

If overdesign is quietly inflating the cost of your next capital project, it’s worth finding out before the design is locked in. Get in touch with Vidatec to talk it through.

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