AECtech+ 2026 | Boston

AECtech Boston 2026 was the 2nd Boston event hosted by Thornton Tomasetti | CORE studio, in partnership with CBT Architects, Perkins & Will, Suffolk Construction, and Speckle. This year saw an expanded program with an AI in AEC Panel discussion and Happy Hour hosted by Speckle at Suffolk’s Headquarters.

Speckle Panel Discussion at Suffolk Construction

Hackathon Presentations at CBT Architects

SPECKLE Happy Hour & AI Panel

AECtech Boston | Speckle Happy Hour & Panel at Suffolk Construction

The event kicked off with an evening AI Panel and Happy Hour on Thursday, August 20th. The evening featured candid conversations on one of the industry's most pressing questions about AI, from the perspective of leaders across AECO and a panel of representatives from the Technology space.

What AI-Native Looks Like in AEC: The Vendors Reshaping AEC's Technology Stack

Brings together the technologists and solution builders, vendors working at the intersection of AI, data infrastructure, and AEC, to share what they're building, why, and where they see the biggest opportunities ahead.

Wan Li Zhu

Co-Founder & Managing Director

Suffolk Technologies

Virginia Senf

Chief Growth Officer

Speckle

James Yamada

Founding AEC Integrations Engineer

xFigura

David Frankel

Principal, Strategic Partnerships & Alliances

Trimble

Barry Chiu

CEO and Co-Founder

Kroo

Matt Jezyk

VP, Head of Product

Motif

Making It Work: How Leading AECO Firms Are Navigating Data and AI in Practice

Shifts to the practitioners: leaders from across the industry who are talking openly about what's working, what's still falling short, and what they've learned as they try to make data-driven delivery real on actual projects.

Rick Rundell

Founder & Principal Advisor

Track 5

Nirva Fereshetian

CIO & Principal

CBT Architects

Jit Kee Chin

CTO

Suffolk Construction

Colin Joynt

SVP, Chief Information Officer

BXP

Nico Azel

Associate

Thornton Tomasetti | Core Studio

Workshops

A Practical Guide to MCP & Multi-Agent Workflows

Agentic AI and MCPs are all the rage these days, but it can be difficult to separate hype from substance. If you'd like to learn about these emerging technologies but aren't sure where to start, join our full-day workshop for a step-by-step, beginner-friendly, and AEC-focused walkthrough of the latest AI protocols. You will learn what Model Context Protocol is, how it works, and how to build your own MCP servers to help automate various design workflows. We will also take a look at MCP features within the latest release of the Swiftlet Grasshopper plugin, which will let us interact with a Rhino model using an LLM. From there, we will explore AI agents, how to easily build them using open-source frameworks, and how to let multiple agents collaborate with each other via the A2A (Agent to Agent) protocol.

Sergey Pigach

Senior Associate Applications Engineer

Thornton Tomasetti | CORE studio

Collaborative Vibe Coding for AEC

This is a fun, collaborative vibe-coding workshop focused on how teams can rapidly develop toward a shared goal. Rather than treating “one-shotting” an app as a solitary exercise, the workshop will show how designers, technologists, and subject-matter experts can work together to frame a problem, define scope, contribute domain knowledge, test assumptions, and refine a working prototype. Participants will leave with a practical framework they can bring back to their firms to make vibe coding more collaborative, engaging, and useful.

No coding background necessary, just a laptop with a browser and curiosity. You'll learn to use AI to write code, use GitHub to collaborate with your team (branches, pull requests, merge conflicts and all), and build small AEC-flavored apps — a 3D viewer, a markup tool, and/or a data dashboard. You'll walk out ready for the next day's hackathon, and the resources and knowledge needed to run this exact workshop back at your own firm.

Collaborative Vibe Coding for AEC at Perkins & Will

Victor Wanderley Barbosa

Schmidt Hammer Lassen

Senior Digital Practice Manager (Associate)

Nirvik Saha, Ph.D.

Perkins & Will

Digital Innovation Technologist

Luke Gehron

Perkins & Will

Computational Designer

Hackathon

On Saturday, August 22nd, hackers from diverse backgrounds came together for a 26-hour hackathon. Working collaboratively across disciplines in 6 teams for the Best Overall, Most Collaborative, and Most Impactful Hack.

Thank you to this year’s panel of Judges!

Matt Jezyk

VP, Head of Product

Motif

Virginia Senf

Chief Growth Officer

Speckle

Robert Otani

CTO

THornton Tomasetti

ZACH KRON

Senior Principal Product Manager

Autodesk

Hackathon Sponsors

Thank you to our fantastic Hackathon sponsors who made the event possible.

See all the Hackathon Projects

2026 Boston Hackathon Projects

BEST OVERALL HACK: New.family

Turn an image into a production-ready Revit family and receive live market pricing.

Axel Wohlin / Arkyv, Oliver Groth / Arkyv, Yuusuf Dahlstrand / Arkyv, Brandon Lee / MIT Center for Real Estate, Bryan Velastegui / Perkins Eastman

MOST COLLABORATIVE HACK: Splatypus

Capturing existing conditions is still hard. Photos are static and impossible to measure, the BIM model may not match what was built, and lidar means expensive hardware and mountains of data. A phone video and a Gaussian splat solve the capture problem — but a splat out of the box is mush: blobs of color with no surfaces, no objects, and nothing to edit them with. Splatypus is the missing editor. Drop in a scan, and it becomes workable: click an object and AI segmentation lifts it out as its own layer you can move, duplicate, or delete. Sketch directly on the surface of the room — the strokes are Gaussians themselves, so they occlude like the scan and survive export. Draw a profile and extrude it into a solid, judged against the real light, materials, and scale. Export a standard .ply any viewer can open.

Sergey Pigach / Thornton Tomasetti CORE studio, Harish Palani / Perkins & Will, Hairu Wang / PARADIGM Structural Engineers, Habib Nahouta Tresor / ArchitAI, Chloe Ni / Harvard