That it makes their work count for more. Norconsult showed investors that design and engineering is 4–12 percent of construction cost but shapes 100 percent of it, and that AI amplifies exactly that. Sweco and AFRY tell the same story in their own registers.
Norconsult
That their work is the leverage point. At its Capital Markets Day in Oslo on 5 November 2025, Norconsult devoted a slide to why the role of consulting engineers has expanded in recent years. The core claim fits on one line:
Design and engineering typically 4–12% of total construction cost while it impacts 100% of cost and quality.
The next line on the slide is the one that matters here. Digital technologies, the company argues, allow better planning, design and engineering, reducing total cost and complexity during construction. And then: "AI further amplifies the benefit of good design and engineering before construction starts." The following slide sets two visions of AI against each other, one that replaces the expert and one that augments the expert, and lands firmly on the second: "Based on our experience so far, AI is a valuable tool in the hand of skilled experts."
Sweco and AFRY
Sweco puts AI on the demand side. Presenting the annual report for 2025, president and CEO Åsa Bergman listed where Europe's money went during the year: "During the year we saw increased investments in Europe's competitiveness through digital and AI development, national energy supply, critical infrastructure and defence capabilities." AI development is named next to energy, critical infrastructure and defence: a reason clients buy engineering, not a threat to it.
AFRY's annual and sustainability report for 2025 treats AI where listed companies treat everything consequential: in the risk section, with a response attached. The response is organisational. "AFRY has established an AI hub to facilitate innovation and disseminate tools, best practice and guidance," the report states, and all divisions have appointed coordinators "to promote the use of AI and drive initiatives to embed it in sales processes and project delivery." Not a lab, not a pilot: coordinators in every division, wired into sales and delivery.
| Company | Message to shareholders | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Norconsult | Design and engineering is 4–12% of construction cost but impacts 100% of cost and quality; AI amplifies the benefit | Capital Markets Day, November 2025 |
| Sweco | AI development named among Europe's investment drivers, next to critical infrastructure and defence | Annual report 2025 |
| AFRY | Group AI hub; coordinators in all divisions embedding AI in sales processes and project delivery | Annual and sustainability report 2025 |
The consensus
One company argues leverage, one reports demand, one describes governance. The registers differ because the documents do: a capital markets day exists to justify a valuation, a CEO statement to sum up a year, a risk section to show control. But none of the three tells shareholders that AI threatens the consulting model, and none files it under distant research. The shared position, stated once and implied twice: the work done before construction is where a project's cost and quality get decided, and AI raises the value of doing that work well.
It helps to remember what kind of documents these are. Investor materials are vetted in ways marketing never is; a slide shown at a capital markets day and a paragraph in an audited annual report both carry consequences if they mislead. When three listed engineering groups, competitors across the same Nordic markets, converge on the same sentence about AI, that is closer to an industry position than anything a single vendor could publish.
The overlap
The consensus carries a practical consequence. If design and engineering is a twentieth to a tenth of construction cost but shapes all of it, then every improvement in pre-construction work is multiplied through everything built on top of it: cheap to get right, expensive everywhere else to get wrong. That is the argument Norconsult put to the capital markets, and it stands on its own, whoever supplies the tools.
It is also the sentence Yesper is built on. Yesper is the AI civil engineer for construction and infrastructure; what the consultancies tell their shareholders is, in the market's own language, why that job matters.
Sources
Yesper is the AI civil engineer for construction and infrastructure. AFRY, COWI, NRC Group and other Nordic firms use it to halve the time on a study, rerun calculations in minutes, and catch errors that would otherwise slip through. Get in touch if you'd like to see what it can do for you.
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