Firstly, I would like to thank all the EFFC member federations for the trust you have placed in me by asking me to serve as President. It is a genuine honour and a responsibility that I take very seriously. As I begin my time in the chair, I have been thinking about where our industry is today, but perhaps more importantly, where it will be when my time as President comes to an end. One thought keeps coming back to me:

I may well be the last EFFC President to serve in a semi-analogue world.

That might sound a little dramatic, but I don’t think it is. We are entering a period in which AI, digitalisation, automation, and our ability to collect and interpret data will increasingly influence how we design, construct and manage our industry. The question for us isn’t whether that change is coming. It is what we choose to do with it.

We already collect enormous amounts of information through our daily life. In our federations, businesses, projects, equipment, people and through news, radio, podcasts etc. In fact, today we collect more data daily as humans as we did in a whole lifetime in Medieval Europe. It’s approximately 32GB per day for every person. Yet collecting data and using data are two very different things. Our opportunity is to turn the data we already have into knowledge.

Used collectively and intelligently, it can help us understand our industry better. We can benchmark ourselves, improve safety and sustainability, identify trends and, critically, provide credible evidence of the contribution specialist geotechnical engineering makes to the built environment. But data alone will not change how our industry is perceived, we also need to become much better at telling our story.

We work in an extraordinary industry. Our members solve complex engineering problems, manage significant risks and create the foundations upon which society quite literally builds. Yet too often, the ingenuity, expertise and importance of what we do isn’t visible beyond our own community.

We need to communicate positively and confidently about our industry.

That doesn’t mean ignoring our challenges. It means having the confidence to discuss them honestly while also celebrating our innovation, our people, our engineering and the contribution we make. And that leads to perhaps the biggest challenge I would like to put to us:

We need to expand our reach considerably.

The EFFC must continue to be a strong network for its member federations, but our collective knowledge and voice have the potential to travel much further. We should be reaching clients and contractors, policymakers and institutions, universities and schools, future engineers and people who currently know very little about the world beneath their feet.

Digital technology gives us the opportunity to do that in ways that weren’t possible even a few years ago. For me, therefore, embracing the digital future isn’t about technology for technology’s sake. It is about using what we know more effectively, communicating what we do more positively, and taking our message to a much wider audience. We have the data. We have the expertise. We have remarkable people and remarkable stories. Now we need to connect them and make them count.

If I really am the last EFFC President of the semi-analogue age, then I would like us to use this period not simply to watch the transition happen, but to help shape it. My challenge to all of us across the EFFC is therefore simple:

Use our data. Tell our story. Extend our reach.

If we do that well, the EFFC won’t simply adapt to the next era of our industry. We’ll help lead it.