Monthly Register — December 2025

Somewhere in most contractors' December board packs there is a slide about artificial intelligence, and by the end of the year it had settled into two columns. One counts the firms saying they are evaluating a tool. The other counts the firms saying they have funded a rollout. The first column is the larger one, usually by a distance, and the gap between the two is the closest thing 2025 produced to an information-management story.

No December headline is holding the year shut — no trade show, no award, no funding print obliged to carry the close. The survey shape is more useful anyway, and shape is the right word for it: there is no percentage to put on this here and no poll to name that I have not got in front of me, and the reporting varies enough between houses that a single figure would be doing more work than it can bear.

What moved

Artificial intelligence became an ordinary sentence on live jobs. That is the year, and contractor reporting of it settled into a shape any document controller will recognise. Evaluating means a working group, a shortlist, a pilot running on last week's export, a paragraph in the board pack. Funded means a budget line, a licence and a named owner. Neither, on its own, tells you whether the job can produce the set it issued in March.

The evaluating column is not idle, either, which is part of what makes it hard to read. A pilot on an export can be genuinely impressive in a meeting room: ask it something, get a clean answer, watch a room that has spent years losing drawings decide the problem is solved. The export is the catch. It was a snapshot on the day somebody downloaded it, and nothing in the demonstration depends on knowing that.

So the useful question was never whether the industry is adopting AI; year-end reporting takes that as read. It is what the funded minority actually bought, and what the evaluating majority is still wrapping. Retrieval against a register that knows which revision is current, and who was sent it, is one object. A chat window over a folder is another. They get sold in the same conversation, sometimes in the same sentence, and they do not do the same work. A tool that summarises whatever happened to be in the download has read a pile, not a register.

That argument sat alongside the conditions this industry already treats as ordinary, and none of them had shifted much by the last working day of December.

Sprawl remained the condition rather than the exception. A mid-size job still ran a model platform, a document platform, a field app, a commercial system and a trail of email. Forty systems and no single source of truth was the autumn 2024 diagnosis, and it was still the diagnosis at the close of 2025. A new login did not retire the unofficial PDF set. An assistant parked on the same native files did not create an issued set of record, and in places it made the problem harder to see: the record looked unified because one prompt returned it, while the contract parties still could not take a complete copy home.

ISO 19650 stayed the language of the BIM execution plan. Suitability codes appeared on title blocks. The container discipline underneath — work in progress, shared, published, archive, one published set — travelled more slowly than the vocabulary, as it has every year since the parts were published. Artificial-intelligence paragraphs were added to those plans through the autumn. A paragraph is not a state machine, and adding one changed nobody's Monday morning.

In the United Kingdom the golden thread stayed a record duty rather than a conference word. Higher-risk buildings needed a set that was identifiable, available and change-controlled: not a folder handed over at practical completion, and not a chat log that cannot be produced when the principal accountable person or the regulator asks for it. Health and safety information, including the file the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations already name, was compiled late more often than it was kept current.

In the Gulf, permit-stage BIM stayed a public-record conversation wherever the text is public, and a new-cover habit wherever it is not. A drawing pack with a model export and a fresh first page still got through more gates than a published container a party outside the authoring licence could actually open.

Then the unglamorous end of the year, which never makes a slide. Labour on site still plotted from a USB more often than from a named state. Photographs and scans accumulated as though volume were a record. The document controller remained the highest-leverage hire on any reconstruction of the issued set, and the one most projects still priced as clerical. Twelve months of that. Evaluating and funded are not two industries — they are one issued-set problem, described in the dialect the surveys chose.

What changed in the standards

Nothing in December worth citing. The turn of a calendar is not a standards event.

What the year did put on the shelf is already on record. Part 6, on health and safety information, was the January text — the ISO publication dated 13 January, the BS EN ISO text dated 31 January — and it specifies concepts and principles for classifying, sharing and delivering structured health and safety information through the project and asset life cycle. Most BIM execution plans had still not absorbed it twelve months later, which is a fact about adoption rather than a piece of December news.

The texts most plans actually pointed at were the ones already in circulation: Part 1 and Part 2 from 2018, Part 3 from 2020, Part 4 from 2022, Part 5 from 2020, and that January Part 6. None of them was new this month. All of them were in use this year, which is a different and rather more interesting fact.

The revision of Parts 1, 2 and 3 spent the year in committee. Systematic reviews had already come back in favour of opening the 2018 and 2020 texts. Committee drafts were registered in early April, and the committee-draft comment period closed on 29 May. August's issue left the work sitting after that closed window and before a Draft International Standard, and December is not the month to invent a DIS registration, a public-enquiry date, or a clause for somebody to quote in a tender reply. Drafting and comment collection remained the honest weather. Appointments claiming ISO 19650 alignment were still aligning, if they aligned to anything, to the published language. Reading a closed comment period as though the new parts had landed is how a job buys a slogan and keeps the register it had in January.

The UK guidance layer that used to travel as the UK BIM Framework was restated earlier in the year under the Information Management Initiative. Not a new ISO part, not a statutory instrument, and no rewrite of the published texts execution plans already cite. The Building Safety Act's information duties in England were already in force and did not arrive in December. Gulf permit-stage BIM requirements remain a class of public-record rule wherever the text is public, without invented datelines or clause numbers. If a national annex, circular or ballot moved during the month, it belongs in a later correction once it can be cited.

One thing to watch

Whether the two-column year survives January. Evaluating against funded. A chat window on a folder against retrieval over a named register. ISO 19650 language without container discipline. A golden-thread duty that assumes a single change-controlled record. A Gulf permit habit still trying to meet a model gate with a PDF and a new cover. Five sentences, one problem.

Watch the word funded in particular, because it is doing a lot of reputational work at the moment. If the licence bought a dashboard over the same native files, the project has a view rather than a state. If the assistant cannot name revision and suitability, it is a cover sheet. And if three applications now claim to be the environment while the plotter in the cabin still takes a USB, the money went somewhere other than the problem.

There is a cheap test available in January, while budgets are being confirmed and nobody has committed to very much. Take a live job, pick a container that was issued in the spring, and ask the funded tool which revision was current on a given day, who it went to, and at what suitability. Then put the same question to a document controller and time them both. If the tool cannot get there and the controller can, what was bought was help with reading. That is worth something on a busy job. It is not a register, and it should not be reported to a board as one.

The year opened on the question of who could prove what had been issued, and it closes on a harder version of the same thing: whether the money that followed the surveys bought a record anyone can produce, or a chatbot sitting on a folder. January will start to tell us.