Jonas Ciplickas — Scale Venture Partners - VLMs are finally giving AEC its 'AI will change everything' moment - February 2026

This article by Jonas Ciplickas of Scale Venture Partners, published in February 2026, argues that Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are finally enabling transformative AI applications in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. It explains how VLMs extend LLM reasoning to images, allowing for semantic, spatial, geometric, and numeric reasoning across multimodal inputs. The piece outlines how VLMs overcome limitations of prior cloud software and LLMs in AEC, enabling end-to-end workflows in areas like documentation creation, permitting, takeoffs, estimation, procurement, and project management. It also discusses the technical workings of VLMs, their rapid advancement (inheriting LLM improvements every ~6 months), and their inherent weaknesses, positioning them as the catalyst for a new wave of $10B+ AEC software companies.