Professor Ali Jadbabaie describes how AI, digital transformation, climate change, and complex geopolitics are forcing engineers and policymakers to rethink how infrastructure is designed, built, and managed.
Stephanie Martinovich|Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Publication Date:
October 28, 2026
Press Contact:
Stephanie Martinovich
Email:smartino@mit.edu
MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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“Designing infrastructure is a highly transdisciplinary, sociotechnical endeavor, involving social, technical, and economic considerations. Understanding how these systems are designed is increasingly important because they are becoming more complex, making decision-making particularly difficult,” says Ali Jadbabaie, JR East Professor and head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
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“We realized that if we’re going to develop a new <a s why MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering co-founded the World Infrastructure Forum," explains Jadbabaie.
For centuries, infrastructure has evolved alongside Artificial information technologies, computing, sensing, and, more recently, digital transformation, it has changed the shape of infrastructure. It has even changed the definition of what infrastructure is. Today, we consider the power grid, semiconductor manufacturing plants, and data centers part of infrastructure, along with wireless infrastructure like cellphone towers and the infrastructure for high-speed internet, just as much a part of our critical infrastructure as roads, water systems, and power grids.
What is different now is the combination and speed of the changes we’re facing. Climate change, resource constraints, and geopolitical instability are putting pressure on the way we designed infrastructure in the 20th century. At the same time, many people are moving out of poverty because of recent economic growth in the developing world. In fact, according to models, by 2028, for the first time in the history of humanity, the median human inhabitant of the planet will live off $10 a day. As more people move out of abject poverty, there will also be an increase in the demand for infrastructure.
If we try to meet that demand using the same ret have the reaining refrastructure while using less water, energy, and materials, and produce less carbon
This is where digital transformation and AI become potentially transformative. Faster and cheaper sensing, greater access to data, and better sensing, actuation, and control can help us make infrastructure decisions more efficiently. AI is slowly permeating the physical world, and we expect it to revolutionize the engineering design process, allowing us to explore many more possibilities, much faster and at a lower cost.
But the story of that hasn’t been written yet, and the outcomes could still be very positive, depending on what we do.
Q:Can you give an example of infrastructure systems becoming more interconnected in a way that changes how we build or manage them?
A: The revolution in information technology and digital transformation over the past 30 years has made infrastructure systems more interconnected. You see this in cities. If the power goes out, water and gas systems can stop functioning, internet fails, and transportation system comes to a halt. If communications networks fail, many other services are affected. We saw this during Covid, when disruptions in supply chains affected energy networks, critical materials, and manufacturing. We see it when geopolitical conflicts disrupt oil and energy markets and those disruptions propagate through other parts of the global economy.
Infrastructure systems that were once managed separately are increasingly dependent on one another. As we connect more things together for more efficiency, we also increase systemic risk and expose the systems to rare but catastrophic failures. They have become rare, but when they happen, they’re much bigger and more consequential.
The really tricky thing is that developing infrastructure involves much more than designing and building it. The whole value chain includes financing and operating it, as well as understanding who will use it and what those users need and prefer.
So, designing infrastructure is a highly transdisciplinary, sociotechnical endeavor, involving social, technical, and economic considerations. Understanding how these systems are designed is increasingly important because they are becoming more complex, making decision-making particularly difficult.
There’s also so much uncertainty in large infrastructure projects. They’re very capital-intensive, the business is lower margin than many other industries, and projects take a long time. Combine all of that, and it has historically made the industry very conservative.
But the transformations coming from AI and digital transformation are potentially offering a new way forward. What that new way looks like, no one has quite delineated it yet.
Q:How are you and your colleagues working to change how these decisions get made?
A: We realized that if we’re going to develop a new approach to infrastructure, no single discipline, company, or country can do it alone. Infrastructure value chain is too interconnected, and the challenges are too large.
That’s why MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering co-founded the
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