Ferrovial's digital transformation - CIIO Dimitris Bountolos on building tomorrow's infrastructure

Dimitris Bountolos, CIIO of Ferrovial, points out that his job title is not a typo. The Chief Information & Innovation Officer of the construction, engineering, and infrastructure giant has a fascinating role and one that he describes with passion and enthusiasm when we meet.

Bountolos and his organization find themselves at the nexus of the physical and digital world, with digital increasing demand for new infrastructure and providing new ways to develop the backbone to business, transport, and communications.

Ferrovial builds and operates infrastructure; most recently, it completed the Silvertown Tunnel in London. Built for Transport for London, the £1 billion road project began in 2019 and saw Ferrovial work in partnership with private investors such as Aberdeen and Invesis as well as public sector stakeholders. The contract for this tunnel lasts 25 years and covers the design, construction, finance, maintenance, and operation of the tunnel.

Digital transformation drives growth across 15 countries

Ferrovial operates in over 15 countries and has a workforce of over 24,000. The business, originally founded in Spain, is now listed on three stock markets: the IBEX 35 in Spain, Euronext of Amsterdam, and recently it joined the Nasdaq. CIIO Bountolos says of this latest listing:

We are gravitating to the US as we are seeing the opportunities for growth there.

Five business units deliver and operate roads in the US, South America, India, Portugal, Spain, and the UK. Ferrovial is a stakeholder and construction leader on the new Terminal One being built at JFK airport in New York, and it has built major parts of London's Heathrow modernization and Dalaman Airport in Turkey. The construction unit played a major role in Crossrail in London, which was Europe's largest civil engineering project. The business also has energy, projects, and a new data center business. Speaking about the latter, Bountolos explains:

Data centers are the factories of the agentic world. Ferrovial has been involved in data centers for more than 40 years, building them for hyperscalers and Co-Lo operators.

With its experience from the energy and construction sector, Ferrovial believes it has a real opportunity to reduce the bottlenecks that often dog data center construction.

Bountolos joined Ferrovial in 2020 to be both the head of technology and to ensure Ferrovial remained at the forefront of using new technology and methods. He brings a different career heritage to the role, having worked with space agency NASA as an advisor, a CDO for an airline in South America, and a customer experience leader for Spain's Iberia airline. He comments on his career and, therefore, current role:

I am always managing the intersection of operations, entrepreneurship, and the corporate world. Technology has always oiled these capabilities and scale, for example, technology was the catalyst to drive the customer experience in airports.

AI and IoT technology reduces risk in billion-dollar infrastructure projects

Digitization has been a major investment strategy of the large construction and civil engineering firms for the last decade. This is due to demand for ever more complex infrastructure in a highly regulated sector requiring new working methods. Bountolos says digitization has been embraced as it provides the sector with an opportunity to jointly reduce the risk of major projects and improve the final execution. As a result, digital twin, Internet of Things (IoT), and Machine Learning (ML) improve planning and forecasting as the sector becomes data-driven. He adds:

We are using these technologies to look at how we can improve the physical asset in terms of materials, forecasting for a tender, and then maintenance and operations. Digital transformation has been a journey, but we now have critical mass in each area, and that has a compounding effect.

Given the size of the projects that Ferrovial takes on, such as new airport terminals, roads, and clean energy systems, there is the potential for significant business risk, but Bountolos says digitization comes to the fore here:

Risk drives innovation. We are not innovative in terms of running a research organization, but we see capabilities from other sectors and bring the best of these technologies to our sector to replace uncertainty.

Innovation for us is about being novel in how we deploy capabilities because the projects we are involved in, such as the Silvertown Tunnel, require a multi-disciplinary approach using smart objects, simulated data, and that involves all professions in a digital environment building a physical world.

It would be impossible to deploy in the times we do without 3D models, sensors, monitoring, LIDAR, and drones. Last year, we captured 5,000 kilometers of road through our drones.

Ferrovial's digital factory standardizes innovation across construction projects

This adoption of new technology has to meet the needs of diverse business lines. Although there are similarities, there are also distinct differences between building and operating an airport and a road tunnel or a data center. Bountolos has developed within his function what he calls a digital factory. This is different to the digital factory concept used by Low Code application development houses, due to those distinct challenges of the business lines. Bountolos says the Ferrovial digital factory instead focuses on trying to industrialize new technologies and methods across the business.

The factory standardizes where possible, in areas such as architecture, security, and data. As well as scouring other sectors for tools that could be used by Ferrovial, Bountolos' team is empowered to build where buying will not fit the purpose. He explains:

If there is uncertainty about how the market will evolve, we can take a chance and develop it ourselves, and that can give us a competitive advantage.

One example of this was in Artificial Intelligence (AI). In 2024, Ferrovial entered into an agreement with US systems integrator DXC Technology to jointly develop the Quercus AI platform that Ferrovial had created. DXC has taken on the maintenance and development of Quercus, a generative AI project that Ferrovial began, which uses Microsoft technology and has the potential to be an enterprise application for organizations beyond Ferrovial.

Building innovation culture beyond traditional construction methods

It has been argued in digital leadership circles in the past that innovation is a culture and not a role, and Bountolos agrees. He says the innovation responsibility is about understanding the needs of the divisions and how they create value, and then bringing forward technologies. He adds:

We are orchestrating growth in the future and catalyzing their department of the future. It can be a schizophrenic job as I need to maintain the rationale of defending the castle, but at the same time, open the castle to new opportunities. Balancing that is the most difficult task and a mix of curiosity, excitement, value, and scale.

Bountolos adds that the culture of Ferrovial aids him in his role, as the business has always had to innovate, from its earliest days laying rail lines in Spain at a speed not seen before, to building the world-famous Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, and having to develop the methods to shape the shimmering shields that architect Frank Gehry envisioned. The CIIO says:

So moving beyond the existing capabilities in order to achieve the execution are ever present.

Central to this is creating an innovation culture, which Bountolos describes as:

You have to be able to enthuse the CTO, architects, and CISO with a responsibility to create value and to be driven by the needs of the users. We are responsible for the implementation and ensuring it does not create friction in the workplace and that comes from a business oriented mindset in all parts of the team and we feel part of the business.

Beyond implementation, Bountolos believes it is vital to democratize technology decision-making throughout the organization. This enables business units to make their own decisions about the development of enterprise technology. A strong network of champions for new technologies exists throughout the business, he says, describing them as true believers who are motivated to do things in new and improved ways.

This approach is helping Ferrovial attract the next generation of engineering talent, which the CIIO says have a high appetite for digital methods.

My take

Innovation has to be cultural, but in any organization, the day-to-day is busy and time-consuming, so it can be hard, neigh on impossible, to think of or adopt new technologies and methods. Having a leader and team to shine a light and take some responsibility for that innovation is one way to build those foundations for new ideas. Bountolos' role and the growth of Ferrovial in recent years show that digital leaders, no matter their career journey, are well placed to lead both technology and innovation.