Have We Entered the Fourth Era of BIM? From the Era of Open Standards to the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been the hottest topic in the construction sector over the last decade. The evolution from CAD to BIM systems has been going on for over 40 years. The current periodization indicates that we are now in the third era of BIM development, the era of open standards, which was initiated by the idea of openBIM in 2012. Earlier evolutionary periods included the model federation (second era) and CAD3D (first era). Since 2022, there has been extremely dynamic development of artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI. AI tools automate some of the tasks that were previously performed by humans. Thus, the research question is: are we entering the next, fourth era of BIM development? The era of artificial intelligence? This chapter attempts to answer this reflective question. During an in-depth literature review, the directions of current and future research on BIM development are discussed.