Engineering firms hold years of reports, each a record of how an expert read a difficult site. With fewer engineers to hire, that archive matters more than ever.
ICG Ingenieure GmbH, a mid-sized geotechnical engineering office in Germany, started a project in 2025 to put it to work.
What ICG Ingenieure GmbH did
With the Mittelstand-Digital Zentrum WertNetzWerke, a publicly funded center for small and mid-sized businesses, ICG set out to develop an AI using real geotechnical reports. The aim was to help classify the information a report needs, select relevant documents and pre-structure content. A planned AI-based knowledge base should make existing expertise easier to reach, improve internal knowledge transfer and reduce recurring work.
The plan ran from the first to the second quarter of 2025: process analysis, workshops, a solution sketch and a prototype to build and test. The project profile names expected benefits such as keeping knowledge, easier onboarding and saved time. It publishes no results.
What it already gives the business
Project lead Dr.-Ing. Mehran Naghizadeh of ICG framed the goal carefully: "From the digitalization project with the Mittelstand-Digital Zentrum WertNetzWerke I hope we can develop a better understanding of how AI can support us in preparing expert reports without compromising quality."
Quality first is the right order for a firm whose reports carry liability.
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
Reports show conclusions. The engineer's reasoning, why one soil reading mattered more than another, often stays unwritten.
A Company Brain could capture that reasoning when reports are reviewed, so junior engineers learn how senior colleagues read a site. That is our hypothesis, and the engineer would stay responsible for every conclusion.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
Track report turnaround time, review corrections and how quickly new engineers sign reports on their own.
A buyer of an engineering firm looks at liability and at how much expertise sits with a few senior people. Documented review reasoning reduces both risks.
The problem behind this case
Facing the same problem?
About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show ICG Ingenieure GmbH staff. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 12, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside ICG Ingenieure GmbH. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected]. Quotes from the German-language source are translated by our team.
Primary source: Funded center project profile, Mittelstand-Digital Zentrum WertNetzWerke, 2025. Available at www.mittelstand-digital-wertnetzwerke.de/digitalisierungsprojekte/projektsteckbriefe/ki-gestuetzte-automatisierung-in-der-geotechnik.