AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) is the umbrella term for the industry that plans, designs, and builds the built environment - three disciplines that traditionally worked from separate drawings and handed work off between silos. BIM exists largely to fix that: a shared, coordinated model lets architects, structural and MEP engineers, and contractors work from the same source of truth instead of reconciling conflicting sets of documents after the fact. When an article or tool on this site says "the AEC industry," it means this combined sector, not any one discipline alone.