ICE Trustees strategy day update – February 2026

At our annual strategy day, trustees and the ICE’s executive team met in Windsor to learn more about NISTA’s future plans and discuss the intelligent strand of the ICE’s 2026-2030 strategy and, in particular, the role of AI in the infrastructure sector.

National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA)

I was delighted to welcome Becky Wood, NISTA's CEO, who provided an overview of the progress NISTA has made in the last nine months and her ambitions for the future.

NISTA, like the ICE, plays a key role in bringing the right people together to make decisions for the longer term.

With £725 billion of infrastructure investment planned in the UK in the next 10 years, it is imperative we keep working together to embed best practice in all infrastructure delivery across the country.

Intelligent

In the ICE’s 2026-2030 strategy, we said we wanted the infrastructure sector to be intelligent.

Our ambition is for technicians and engineers across our membership to broaden and deepen their skills so they can be at the ‘top of their game’. We want them to leverage all forms of technology whether it be-AI, quantum sensors or future iterations of BIM, ethically, transparently and for the benefit of people and planet.

While the ICE has long supported the integration of technology in the infrastructure sector, this is the first time we have made it a strategic priority.

I was therefore keen for trustees to spend most of our strategy day talking about what the ICE should be doing in this area.

To kick off our thinking we focused on the role of AI in the sector.

AI in infrastructure

Mark Coates, Bentley Systems, and Nasrine Tomasi, head of AI and information management at Mott McDonald, joined us for the morning and shared their insights on how AI is currently perceived and being used across the infrastructure sector.

It is clear there is a wide spectrum in knowledge of AI, in its various forms, and uptake by organisations, big and small.

What was abundantly clear was that it is changing the way we design, investigate, deliver and assess infrastructure projects and it will continue to do so at pace.

We need to be agile. What we think the world will be like three years from now will likely be very different from what we imagine today.

We discussed the role of the ICE in this change and agreed that as an institution, we will focus on guidance that ensures new tools uphold our high standards and are used ethically.

This is something we will be exploring further across the year.