Pairing geotechnical data with AI helps New Zealand to build better
Olivia Ellis-Garland clicks on a map of New Zealand on her laptop and types: “Show me the investigations in Hobsonville.” A list pops up in seconds and the map automatically zooms, displaying underground tests of the scenic Auckland suburb, each containing crucial data like soil composition, water levels and rock layers.
Details like these inform Ellis-Garland, an engineering geologist, what the ground beneath is made of and how it behaves. She uses this data to advise her clients at geotechnical engineering firm ENGEO what can be built above ground and how.
This complex information on sites across the country can now be navigated and queried in natural language using AI, thanks to the upgraded New Zealand Geotechnical Database (NZGD) hosted on BEYON, the digital twin platform developed by global engineering consultancy Beca.
With BEYON, engineers can see and interact with a “high fidelity representation” of the real world that “looks like, behaves like and is connected to the real world,” said Stephen Witherden, Beca’s product strategy manager.
Both NZGD and BEYON run on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure. BEYON’s AI assistant, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 large language model, was developed using Azure OpenAI in Microsoft Foundry.
“The NZGD now and the AI tool has made us really responsive because it can just bring up so much information so quickly,” said Ellis-Garland. “This is our gateway to the ground.”
Christchurch quake
The NZGD was born in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that struck Christchurch in February 2011. A total of 185 people were killed, thousands displaced and much of the city center’s infrastructure was badly damaged.
Engineers involved in rebuilding efforts urgently needed data on sub-surface conditions to make critical decisions, such as whether a structure could be safely repaired or restored, or needed to be demolished entirely.
Ellis-Garland recalled working on around 4,000 assessments for homes that needed to be rebuilt. “It’s sensitive work when people are displaced and so we had to do our work really quickly,” she said.
But collating that data was a challenge.
“It can be pretty fragmented,” said Beca CEO Amelia Linzey.
She explained that results of underground scans or tests are collected by different agencies or private developers when a site is being built. Being unable to access such data meant engineers had to spend time and money drilling fresh boreholes to collect new data or, frustratingly, the same data that someone else might already have.
Creating a common repository to centralize and share all that information was the obvious solution.
“That was really the sentiment behind the NZGD,” said Linzey. “Getting that data together as a national asset.”
The NZGD was established in 2013 by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. Ten years later, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment invited proposals to host and upgrade the platform. By then, the NZGD had amassed thousands of users and around 168,000 geotechnical tests had been uploaded and shared.
NZGD 2.0, on Microsoft Azure
Beca submitted its idea for the next version of NZGD to use BEYON, its digital twin platform. This idea was accepted, making Beca the next custodian of the NZGD.
In November 2024, it launched the updated NZGD, which now runs on an SQL database on Microsoft Azure and is accessed via BEYON.
“Our focus was making it modern, secure, standards-compliant and integrated with modern spatial analytics technologies,” said Beca’s Witherden. “So that allows us to have better data quality, usability and access.”
Beca opted for digital twin technology, said Witherden, because it’s the best way to curate and manage complex, interconnected engineering information.
Shifting NZGD’s technology stack to Azure made it more accessible, scalable and secure, said Witherden, with access controls like Azure Entra ID. It also set the foundation for more bells and whistles.
In late 2025, Beca added an agentic AI layer in BEYON, enabling over 4,300 NZGD users to filter, query and extract geotechnical data using natural language. The AI assistant was designed in Microsoft Foundry, with strict rules guiding its responses.
“Using Microsoft Foundry has been such a great tool for us because it has built-in guardrails, and that allows us to control how the AI responds,” said Witherden. “It’s not allowed to do geotechnical analysis.”
Having all this data and technology on tap means users like Ellis-Garland can make better decisions, faster.
The AI assistant not only zeroes in on the investigation logs for her; it helps her cut through the ensuing information overload.
“What is really helpful is you can eliminate data that you don’t need,” she said. She can ask the AI to only show her cone penetration tests, for example, and remove investigations done using hand augers.
Beca estimates that with the AI assistant, engineers on average take 40% less time to retrieve the data they need.
Meanwhile, the more data is shared, the higher the confidence level.
At the Hobsonville site, Ellis-Garland saved time and expense because she knew where to target ground investigations for the 400 homes her client was building. Earlier scans of the surrounding area on NZGD already told her how and where the geology changed.
“Because it’s such a good platform, all of the engineers have been using it and uploading data. So, we’re able to stay current with more and more information to draw on,” said Ellis-Garland. “The NZGD is like our Earth library.”
Detailed analysis, such as assessing slope stability or liquefaction – the phenomenon where ground behaves like liquid during a temblor – require a consistent stream of data on which calculations can be run.
“The more that we have of that, the better our job is,” said Ellis-Garland. “We can now build better because we’ve got so many more resources to draw from.”
More improvements are in store, said Witherden, to provide richer visualizations of NZGD data and use AI to boost the audit and review process, which ensures the information uploaded is accurate and reliable.
“Having better access to this data makes for more resilience and safer and better prepared communities,” he said.
For Beca, NZGD on BEYON is now part of its legacy as the country’s largest professional services consultancy.
“Our purpose is to make every day better,” said CEO Linzey. “This is us thinking about how we can bring together a hundred-year legacy of being in New Zealand and all the work that we’ve done, including the geotechnical information that has been collected. And giving it in a way that can help our clients make decisions for the future prosperity of the country.”
Top image caption: Engineering geologist Olivia Ellis-Garland, shown here at a building site in Hobsonville, Auckland, describes the Microsoft Azure-powered New Zealand Geotechnical Database (NZGD) as “our gateway to the ground”. Photo by Radical for Microsoft.
Lim Ai Leen reports on AI for Microsoft Source, focusing on how it’s improving lives in Asia. Ai Leen was formerly associate foreign editor at The Straits Times in Singapore and still pens an occasional weekend column. Contact her on LinkedIn.
