New Bechtel Chief Innovation Officer to Keynote Summit, Reflecting Depth of Construction Giant’s Technology Bench

The agenda for our U.S. Summit is rapidly coalescing and this week we are pleased to announce that Keith Churchill of Bechtel will be capping off two full days of discussion around the most potent trends fueling the construction industry with a Keynote Presentation that will look out over the next five years of innovation. Keith was recently named Chief Innovation Officer for Bechtel and this won’t be the first time he’s provided BuiltWorlds members with his valuable insights. Just last fall, he was part of a panel of industry leaders and technologists who weighed in on their experiences and best practices when working through pilot programs.

The largest construction company in the United States, Bechtel boasts, among its ranks, an impressive bench of some of the leading minds on emerging technology in the industry. BuiltWorlds has hosted quite a few of them over the years. David Wilson, Keith’s predecessor as Chief Innovation Officer, delivered a keynote address at our 2018 Summit. Peter Nelson, Director of Infrastructure Development, provided his own keynote at our 2020 Infrastructure conference, examining the opportunities and challenges of Smart Infrastructure.

At our 2020 Project Delivery conference, Bechtel’s Project Manager John Platt was part of a panel that discussed how innovative technologies were creating safer jobsites for workers. Additionally, just last year, Bethany Gardner, Design Thinking Research Lead for Bechtel, participated in our Adoption Leaders 50 Call, to discuss some of the new positions engineering and construction companies are adding to their teams to help them identify promising technologies, map out tech leveraged business strategies, and integrate and disseminate that tech across their organization.

Taken together, the span of activities of this group range from smart infrastructure to user centered design to piloting emerging tech in the field to promote safety and more, and this breadth and depth is one reason Bechtel was featured in our 2020 U.S. Innovators Report. In particular, we looked at an area, key to Churchill’s background, highlighted the success of the Bechtel Innovate program, which has allowed the company to accelerate and deploy more than 250 high-impact innovations to projects around the globe.

Against this backdrop, we very much look forward to hearing Churchill’s discussion of the firm’s vision and priorities for technological innovation in the coming years.