Megatrends One Year Later – #4: Digital Twinning – What I Predicted, and What’s Actually Happening

“With a digital twin, we don’t just envision the future; we build it, test it, and perfect it, long before it ever touches the real world.” – Futurist Jim Carroll

One year ago, in June 2025, I published Megatrend #4: Digital Twinning as part of my 30 Megatrends series.

Here’s what I wrote:

It‘s one of the most unappreciated but most powerful megatrends with a huge amount of potential. And you might not know it, but it’s already being used all around you.

What’s it all about? Think of it this way – it involves the creation of virtual replicas that allow for unprecedented simulation, optimization, and predictive capability, involving things like supply chains, buildings, manufacturing processes, and even surgery. in essence, we can figure things out before committing to doing those things. In that way, we can solve previously impossible problems, by testing and simulating them first.

Imagine being able to test out a big, expensive idea without actually building anything. Or fixing a problem in your factory before it even happens. Sounds like science fiction, right? It’s not. It’s happening right now, and it’s changing how businesses operate.

So how is the trend unfolding? At speed!

The digital twin market in manufacturing alone was valued at roughly $47 billion in 2026, with some forecasts putting it near $328 billion by 2030. Aerospace, automotive, electronics and energy utilities are now past 70% adoption — piloting or fully deployed.

But manufacturing isn’t even the most interesting part of this one a year later. The infrastructure and construction application I featured from my son Willie’s article — drones building digital twins from point clouds, 3D meshes, and orthomosaics for bridges, power lines, and buildings — is now its own booming category: the drone infrastructure-inspection market alone tops $4.5 billion in 2026, growing 25–30% a year, with photogrammetric bridge and asset inspections now routinely replacing rope-access crews.

And the healthcare extension I speculated about — organ-level digital twins for surgical planning — arrived faster than the industrial side. The digital twins in healthcare market is projected to grow from $4.47 billion in 2025 to $59.94 billion by 2030, a 68% CAGR, with Siemens Healthineers, GE Healthcare, and Philips already running patient-specific cardiac and organ models that let surgeons rehearse a procedure before touching a patient.

This is no longer an emerging category. It’s infrastructure — industrial, civil, and now clinical.

Verdict: Nailed it, and undersold two-thirds of it. I put my number on manufacturing a year ago. The infrastructure-inspection and healthcare applications turned out to be moving just as fast, or faster.