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Interview
To begin, could you share details of your career history and how you came to be in your current role? After completing my PhD at ETH Zürich, I joined Leica Geosystems as a project manager, a company that later became part of Hexagon. In that role, I gained first-hand experience of how advanced technologies and global innovation can transform a long-established industry and set the foundation for my passion for precision and progress.
That experience sparked a lasting interest in how technology can help people work with greater accuracy and purpose. My background in geodesy – the science of surveying and measurement technology – showed me how deeply accuracy shapes progress in the real world, and how innovation builds on that foundation. Over time, this evolved into a fascination with how autonomy, data, and intelligence are redefining the way we design, build, and operate.
Now at Hexagon, I lead innovation across the company’ s measurement and automation solutions, advancing technologies that help engineers, surveyors, and construction professionals work more efficiently, safely, and accurately in complex environments.
Hexagon has been at the forefront of digital transformation in construction. How would you describe the moment we’ re in right now for the industry? We’ re at an inflexion point where digital tools are starting to think for themselves. Until recently, construction technology focused on collecting and storing data, now, it can interpret that data and act on it in real time.
As such, instruments are evolving from passive tools into active partners on-site. For example, the Leica TS20 Robotic Total Station uses an integrated Neural Processing Unit( NPU) to streamline targeting and measurement workflows, reducing manual steps and helping surveyors maintain consistent accuracy even in challenging environments.
This shift toward intelligent autonomy means projects can adapt faster, verify work continuously, and reduce costly rework, changing the way teams plan, execute, and manage every stage of a build.
From your perspective, what’ s driving the push toward smarter, more connected instruments on-site? The demands for faster delivery, tighter budgets, and higher sustainability expectations are rising, all while the skilled workforce continues to shrink. Smarter, connected instruments help bridge that gap by taking on repetitive tasks, reducing rework, and keeping every data point accurate from start to finish.
When data remains consistent and traceable, everyone, from the surveyors onsite to engineers and project managers in the office, can make decisions based on the same information. That consistency builds trust, prevents costly errors, and keeps projects moving even when conditions change. This demonstrates how connectivity strengthens efficiency while reinforcing the sector’ s capacity to adapt and recover.
Why is processing data directly on-site such a game-changer for infrastructure projects and how do you balance that real-time AI performance with data privacy and security? It starts with a simple principle: keep control close to the source. With the TS20, on-device processing is enhanced by the integrated NPU, which enables faster interpretation of measurement data, supports autonomous optimisation of workflows, and reduces the potential for errors. Processing data on the instrument helps maintain efficiency in lowconnectivity environments while ensuring that sensitive project data stays within the device’ s secure architecture.
When intelligence sits directly onsite in this way, teams can spot and fix problems as they happen, before small
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