‘UK BIM Framework gains traction with AI search tool’

BIMplus (21 February 2025) reports views of guidance in the online UK BIM Framework have been boosted by a series of weekly short videos showing how the platform’s artificial intelligence (AI) search tool answers simple questions.

The Framework is a free online resource developed and maintained by nima and BSI. It provides guidance, checklists and FAQs to help individuals and organisations understand fundamental principles of information management. It also has links to the relevant British and international standards on the BSI website.

Each video is around 60 to 90 seconds long. The first – What is a CDE? – was released on the LinkedIn social media platform on 23 January 2025, and has been viewed over 2,000 times in 28 days. Each of the next four videos have so far also recorded over 1,000 views each and received numerous comments. Over 1,300 click-throughs to the UK BIM Framework guidance have been recorded, boosting overall traffic to the site by around 10 per cent. And over 200 people have been added to the Framework’s followers on LinkedIn since the campaign began.

The Framework was updated in June 2024 (news) to include a new AI search function, enabled by the Morta platform. The videos show a user asking ‘Morta AI’ simple questions – What is a naming convention? What is BIM? or Why is Information Management important? for example – and then getting a text explanation based solely on content from the guidance resources (not on content scraped from across the internet).

Guidance editor and co-author Sarah Davidson says the Framework team identified some strong early subjects for the videos based on the top 10 searches. She continues:

“Once people see how easy it is to use the Morta AI search tool, they can then get answers to their own questions, with useful weblinks to the relevant sections of the guidance. Questions can range from simple ‘what is …’ type queries to quite nuanced enquiries (‘should an information container ID exist in more that one CDE state at a time?’).”

The UK BIM Framework is going to be expanded during 2025 to include additional information management resources, and will be re-branded as the “IMI Framework” to support organisations engaged in the Information Management Initiative (IMI). Backed by the Construction Leadership Council and nima, and launched in November 2024 (news), the IMI aims to progressively transform information management practices across the built and natural environment sector.