Unveiled at Unbound 2025, Bluebeam’s latest innovations signal a powerful shift to connected, collaborative engineering workflows powered by AI.
The Bluebeam story has fast expanded over the years from a PDF markup tool to a productivity platform that helps engineers work smarter and faster, together.
New functionality revealed at Unbound 2025 has unveiled the next chapter – Bluebeam as a business-level automation engine that enables real, organisational outcomes.
Some of the headline functions of the new premium plan, known as Bluebeam Max, are the AI Review and AI Match features. They’re both outcomes of Bluebeam’s recent acquisition of Firmus AI.
“Integrated right into Bluebeam Revu is this exceptional technology that can analyse a set of drawings and identify issues within those drawings,” said Luke Prescott, Bluebeam’s Senior Director, Product Management.
“For example, it can reconcile door schedules and window schedules. Right out of the gate, it can help a user identify, ‘What am I not seeing here that I should be aware of?’, and it puts markups directly on the drawing.”
When a user opens up a drawing set, there are typically numerous things they look for. That could be anything from the title block to the address, to page scales and specifics about the design and detail.
Bluebeam Max automates these tasks, freeing up the designer or engineer to focus on higher-value areas. At the same time, Bluebeam Max brings entirely new capabilities to the table, offering the engineer the technological equivalent of superpowers.
One such piece of functionality is the merging of 2D markups and 3D design across numerous technology platforms.
Engineering workflow automation: 2D to 3D game changer
“We’ve essentially cracked the code to be able to embed markups in a third-party application,” Prescott said. “In this case, it’s a new integration with the Autodesk Revit application.”
The user starts in Revit and they create a connected session, he said. This enables a relationship between the 3D model, the 2D sheets in Revit and the 2D PDFs in Bluebeam’s Studio Sessions.
“When I markup a Studio Session, that markup is now also populated in Revit,” Prescott said. “And in Revit, I can set the status of the markup in 2D or 3D. That’s the same markup that’s in the Studio Session.”
It gets “really fun”, Prescott said, because Studio Sessions are supported across the Bluebeam ecosystem of Revu, web, iOS and Android.
“I can put an as-built model into Revit, and I can create my Session,” he said. “I can invite my field team to go out into the field and make markups in real time.”
“Those markups will go from mobile into Revit, using Studio Sessions as the framework. So, team members can place a markup on their mobile device in the field and have that go back to the Revit model. That’s an absolute game changer.”
By uniting mobile teams, designers and models through connected construction technology, Bluebeam Max is closing the loop between design, construction and review, a long-standing challenge for multidisciplinary engineering projects.
Innovative project efficiency tools for engineers
Claude is a large language model (LLM) AI tool, similar to ChatGPT. Anthropic, the creator of Claude, has also developed a model context protocol that enables technology developers to develop secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI tools.
For subscribers to Bluebeam Max, this opens up entirely new possibilities that they likely haven’t even imagined in the past.
“We can take all of the text from a PDF, including all of the markups, and feed that into the LLM,” Prescott said. “You can then ask questions of your drawings.”
It could be quick and simple, such as, “What’s the address of this job?” or “Create all of my PDF page labels based on information in the title block”, to something more complex, like, “Produce a written narrative of all the material that’s in my bid and in the scope and also create a live, real-time dashboard of my markup material”.
“I asked it to create a calendar view of all the markups that had been placed, including filters by author and by status, and it immediately produced a calendar,”
Prescott said. “I could see all the markups, who placed them, what they contained and when they were placed, and I could filter them, and the entire process took 90 seconds. The limit really is someone’s imagination.”
These tools set businesses up for a future including not just personal productivity outcomes, but entirely new business outcomes, Prescott said.
“Organisations can now build automated workflows using AI in new ways,” he said.
“They can build standard operating procedures for large teams, and Revu and other Bluebeam tools are now at the centre of that.”
One brief conversation at Unbound captures the technology’s attraction perfectly. “Someone asked a visitor what brought them to Unbound,” Prescott said. “They said, ‘We’re a drywall contractor looking to see how AI can help our business.’”
“There’s no other context where you’d hear ‘drywall contractor’ and ‘AI’ in the same sentence and be completely serious. But they walked away with some incredible tools. Bluebeam Max focusses on end users being able to supercharge their work.”
Bluebeam Max will be available as a premium subscription plan in 2026. Learn more and join the Bluebeam Early Access Program here
