Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how to use dashboards to drive project and business objectives forward with Data Exchange and AEC Data Model.
- Learn about the product road maps for Data Exchange and Revit software's strategy for connected data with AEC Data Model.
- Learn how to create data exchanges and set up AEC Data Model for your Revit projects.
Speakers
MATT ARSENAULT: Hello, everybody. Welcome to AS3175, Dashboard Your Data, Connecting AEC Data Model and Data Exchange to Power BI. Real quick safe harbor statement-- so we are going to be making some forward-looking statements during this presentation. So please just don't make any purchasing decisions solely based off of the information and content you see in this presentation today.
As for us, my name is Matt Arsenault. I'm a product manager on the Revit Core team with a concentration on Revit data and interoperability. Just a little bit about myself, I come from the AEC industry. I had about 10 years of experience covering all kinds of different roles across digital fabrication, architecture, and working in general contracting as well. And I'm going to hand that over to my co-presenter, Tobias Hathorn.
TOBIAS HATHORN: Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Tobias Hathorn, I'm a product manager at Autodesk, and I've been here for 18 years. Prior to that, I spent five years practicing architecture and worked on one-million square foot Revit building for the IRS before joining Autodesk. I have a passion for interoperability and bringing a lot of the rich BIM information into the cloud and making it accessible to everybody. So I hope you enjoy today's session.
MATT ARSENAULT: Thanks, Tobias. So overall, with this presentation today, let's first go through a few of our learning objectives. So first, we're going to present some product roadmaps for both Data Exchange, Revit, as well as the AEC Data Model. We're going to teach you how to create a Data Exchange and set up a data model for your Revit projects. And finally, we're also going to teach you how you can leverage Power BI dashboards to drive project and business objectives forward for your form for your company.
And so first, let's set the stage with some context in regards to our strategy and vision for AECO data at Autodesk. Inside of the AEC industry, we see that more data is being created than ever before. We see that there are four times the amount of data created over the past few years, and realistically, that's expanding two and 1/2 times faster than any other industry.
And along with this explosion in creation of data, there's also an extreme growth in the amount of cost that's created and wasted because of this unused data. It's $88 billion in just rework alone. And with all of that data that we're seeing, almost 96% of it goes unused, and 81% of owners and operators, they really want to drive their businesses forward with better decisions. So data is a big problem. And we really think that there's a better way that we can do it and provide better data for the AEC industry.
We've probably seen this slide before-- the digital thread, the ideal dream world of connected data across all phases of design, from planning to design, construction, and operations, seamlessly flowing throughout. And this is where we want to get to. But today, we really know that we don't have a digital thread. We've got more of a digital spread where there's disconnected areas when an architect hands over information to a contractor or a subcontractor or even just a collaborator they're working with in the engineering space. And then that data goes over to operations and it gets lost again and it creates a lot of rework. And that idea of a continuous thread is broken almost immediately.
And due to this, there's just a number of challenges that are facing all of you-- uninformed decisions due to incomplete, outdated or unavailable information, inefficiency and rework, because interoperability is caused to force silos and creating workarounds, manual data transfers and unnecessary rework. And there's just a lack of trust. The data is closed. It's proprietary, and it's unreliable and unstructured.
And when we look at those challenges, we see three major root causes. First is the lack of accessibility to data. It's not really easy to get to the information that you need. There's a lack of connectivity, so actually bringing it from place to place is rather difficult. And the lack of data utility-- actually using that data and leveraging it to become an advantage.
And so what we've seen in the industry, as well as just globally across technology over the past decades, is that data is really trapped into models and files. We've got files across the AEC industry where you're using plenty of applications inside of a single project, whether that be Revit, Rhino, AutoCAD, Forma, et cetera. This data all becomes locked in one single file format, and we've tried plenty of ways to get it out. And it's also just difficult to translate that information across these applications. Interoperability is hard. Getting those schemas and standards, those classifications and everything to unite into one central place is a major challenge. It's low-trust mindsets, closed tech platforms, and the AEC industry has somewhat been cloud resistant.
And ultimately, because of all this, decisions are made on outdated, inaccurate, and incomplete information, whether this be analysis, specifications, 2D views, estimates, details, dashboards, or schedules. Having the right information at the right time is critical for us to move forward when it comes to data. If we really want to realize better-connected data, we need to make it more accessible by exposing all of this information outside of the bounds of products so you can have controlled sharing so we can get to that digital thread where you can connect it to all of your applications, breaking down those silos of individual proprietary file formats to improve collaboration and eliminate that unnecessary rework. And we have to make it useful to improve quality and enforce standardization.
And so within Autodesk, you've heard plenty over the week here at AU about granular data, and that's because we're moving from files to granular data, and that means that we're starting to take those monolithic file formats and start to break it up in those bits and pieces of information that are inside of the file that are actually the most valuable, whether that be an individual element, a property, just a piece of geometry. It's all extremely valuable, and we need to give you access to the little bits of pieces and subsets of that data versus always providing you the whole thing. And so by breaking up files into these valuable bits of data that are stored and managed on the cloud, that's the first thing that we're doing, breaking all of this up and then storing it into the cloud so that way you can access it wherever you need to whenever you need to.
And this is ultimately going to reduce the complexity of working together by democratizing that access to the most current information. So all of your project stakeholders have access to the data when they need it at whatever latency is required. And we can standardize how data is translated across systems, classifications, ultimately decreasing all of that rework for you. The power of granular data is extremely high. And we also believe that when we start to put the data first, different views of the data are easy to create, enabling better decisions. When you put the data at the center, analysis, specifications, 2D views, cost estimate, details, dashboards, and schedules all just become different representations in ways to get to the data and visualize that data versus being a source of the data to begin with.
And at Autodesk, we're really focused on two ways to empower granular data for the AEC industry. First, with the AEC Data Model, and second, with Data Exchange. In first, we're going to kick off what is the AEC data model, and what are the capabilities that can enable you to leverage all of this data? With AEC data model, we Envision an open, extensible, and trusted data foundation connecting AECO teams and their tools of their choice. As I mentioned, there's tons of tools across the platform, and we need to make sure that we are working with all of them and allowing you to use whatever tool it is to do the best job.
And to do this, we're creating a data ecosystem. This includes granular data, but on top of it, all of the capabilities between storage, experience, data management, libraries, and standardization across all of this. So that way we can empower the best future for AEC. And ultimately, data is going to be a foundation to a Forma industry cloud. As one of the key foundations, we said that Forma industry's cloud is going to deliver data that flows seamlessly throughout project phases, stakeholders, and asset types, building, water, transportation, and industrial.
And so to do that, we've created the AEC Data Model, which is a cloud database for ECO, enabling a shared language across the life cycle of a project. And with all of this, this is underpinned by having all of the data in Docs. Autodesk Docs is our repository for AEC Data, enabling you to hold files and granular data in a singular place so you can just continue to work the way you do today and reap the benefits of granular data tomorrow. And ultimately on top of the AEC data model are cloud services and capabilities like the AEC data model API, which enable granular data access across third parties and customer applications so you can access data information from Revit today that is stored in Docs using GraphQL, and you can search across multiple projects or even in the same project. Again, it's about getting access to the data that you need when you need it.
So for example, here's a short demo of the AEC data model API. So using Revit 2024 or Revit 2025, every time you publish a model to the cloud ACC, that information is granularized and placed right into the AEC Data Model. So you can use the AEC Data Model GraphQL API to query whatever you need. So in this case, if I want to query for just the walls in my project, I can do so. And I just get the properties that are associated with walls. So gone are the days of downloading entire databases of full models and just getting access to the data that you need.
Or what if I need to do a more complex query and understand what are all of the elements that are on level three or get the information that's only associated to my rooms? All of that is accessible today via the AEC Data Model API. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Tobias to talk a little bit about Data Exchange.
TOBIAS HATHORN: Yeah. Thank you, Matt. Very inspiring to hear all about Autodesk's data strategy. So as Autodesk is developing the foundational AEC data model and starts to deliver amazing new experiences like Forma, we're also developing interoperability solutions that let you read and write geometry and properties between the rich ecosystem of apps you use every day. So this new utility is called Autodesk Data Exchange. Do you mind going back one slide, Matt? And it's intended to help you move your design data across boundaries securely between app boundaries and between organizational boundaries.
So first, let's talk about application boundaries. We're demonstrating that Autodesk is an open ecosystem by acknowledging that Autodesk tools are not the only ones required to get your work done. So you already see connectors being built by the Data Exchange team for Rhino or Tekla or SolidWorks and Power BI-- why we're here today, meaning that you can pull data into an Autodesk ecosystem and send data out of the Autodesk ecosystem. To me, that's the definition of open.
So let's talk about organizational boundaries as well. Data exchanges provide gated access to only a subset of your design without requiring you to share access to your source files. In the past, the smallest unit of collaboration was sending somebody a file. But now, you can collaborate on a single element, if that's desired, or a handful of elements filtered by category or by level or by phase or by discipline. You don't have to send your entire Revit file to other project team members at different companies anymore. So next slide, Matt.
This is an example of a typical Data Exchange workflow in action where there's two different companies collaborating between Revit and Rhino on a canopy that goes over a courtyard. So if we can start the video, this will show reaching a milestone in the design process. So we have company A, Acme, and Luna, who is reaching that milestone. And instead of sharing this entire design file, she's just going to share a subset of it. She's going to create that subset by using Revit selection box to limit the geometry, but also turn off categories that are not relevant and only include the pieces that are necessary for this canopy to go over the structure.
And she's using a Revit connector, Data Exchange connector for Revit, and choosing which project folder in Autodesk Docs she wants to put this exchange in. So this allows her to separate the source Revit file from the Data Exchange that gets shared. So here's an example of that Data Exchange in Autodesk Docs, a rich preview, that is now shared with Globe-X corporation and Javier, who's working in Rhino with a Rhino connector. So Javier is navigating, previewing, and then loading that Data Exchange into Rhino. There are a couple of options here where he's able to choose just the properties that he wants to load along with it, and he gets this rich contextual geometry to design his responsibility, his work package, on top of.
So now, Javier has finished his work, and he's going to send this back over to the Revit user. And again, able to just send the panels-- not having to send the entire information over. Luna is now able to load this into her model and coordinate these two work packages together, making sure that connection points are in place and if things need to change over time, that these two linked data exchanges can be updated as versions change. Now, the system is dynamic in that you can load both of those data sets into Inventor as well. There's no need to export to Inventor or load a different file type. You're loading the same Data Exchange into that different context.
And likewise, you can load those same data sets into Power BI. Here's a simple example of the Revit data set being loaded into Power BI. But also, here's an example of the Rhino data set being loaded into Power BI, and all the attributes that are on each of those panels are able to be seen and displayed here. So the Data Exchange ecosystem is a one to many system, allowing data from a lot of different sources to go into a lot of different applications. So next slide. Matt, I think you were going to talk about this example.
MATT ARSENAULT: Yeah. So the reason that's why we're here today is to really start to understand how can we start to leverage something like Power BI to get this data so that way we can build dashboards for business intelligence? And that Power BI, as Tobias mentioned, has a direct connection to any of the applications as part of the data exchange ecosystem. But we've also enabled the capability for a AEC data model to connect right into Power BI as well-- so allowing a direct connection today from Revit directly into Power BI without any imports or exports or any of the stuff in between.
And so we can see here today, this is a demo of doing that. We can create and publish our model from a AEC data model, just as we did. And in this case, we're just going to go into Power BI and start to build a dashboard where we can start to build all kinds of different visualizations that we need to understand our data. In this case, I'm going to first start building a curtain wall panel. And so now, I can build a dashboard of all of the curtain panels that are in my model. I can start to build schedules and I can do conditional formatting to understand what's missing in my data. And I can use all the capabilities of Power BI to help myself drive these products forward, and it's really great for model QI, whether that be for structural steel schedules or even trying to build dashboards about all of the information related to the rooms and the program of my building.
And what's great is because it's connected to the publish workflow, every time you publish, the data becomes available. So in Power BI, all you have to do is hit Refresh. You no longer have to import or export. And now I just get the latest data when I need it.
And so how do you get started with granular data AEC at Autodesk? So for one, like I mentioned with AEC Data Model, the first step is that you have to go to your Account Admin settings in ACC. So there's a slight toggle, so the admin would enable this for your entire hub where you've got an activation button under AEC Data Model, and right next to it is a button that says Enable AEC Data Model capabilities. When you click Activate, that will turn on the ability for all Revit 2024 and Revit 2025 models which are either uploaded or published to Docs to granularize them into the AEC Data Model.
Now, one thing to note about this, this is fully stable, and it's not going to have any impact on any of the files that you have in ACC today. But it is only going to work for models that are newly uploaded or published. It's not going to retroactively start publishing the information that you already have in Docs. So you will need to re-upload those models or just publish the latest one if you already are in that process.
TOBIAS HATHORN: All right. So that's a great summary of how easy it is to get an AEC data model created in the background. I'll show you a few ways to get a Data Exchange created, and there's three different ways for you to get those data exchanges into Power BI. So it depends on how your company likes to work, so all three of these methods can work for you, but they might work for better for different people.
The first way that we're looking at right now is through a published 3D view in Autodesk Docs viewer. These are created in the Revit app. You can apply a section box, like we saw in the video, view filters, and view templates first. The only trick with this method is you want to include these 3D views in your published set when you save and publish your Revit file to the Autodesk Docs. Once you do that, you see this list of views on the left-hand side, and any of these views can be converted into a Data Exchange so you're only sharing a subset of the Revit model, the filtered view, that can then be loaded into Power BI.
The second method is also in Autodesk Docs viewer, so you don't have to be in Revit in order to do this, and it allows you to work with Revit 2024 or 2025 because it's based on the data model. Basically, you can filter here, in the viewer, to achieve the subset of elements that you want to export into a Data Exchange. You can filter by category, by family, and by type, arrive at a subset, making your own view on the fly, and then use that in Power BI. The important note with both of these workflows is that they update automatically. As the Revit source file is upversioned, then both of those data exchanges will also upversion automatically. Hooray for automation.
In this example, this is using the Revit plugin that we saw in the Rhino video earlier. So this is probably the most flexible, and it's also very useful for setting up your workflows. But there is no automation with this workflow, so it depends on what stage you're at with your project. This might be really helpful for setting things up. Basically, you download the Revit connector for Revit 2023, 2024, or 2025, and then directly in Revit, you can set up the exchange and the view and get things exported and going. There's no automation here, but you can iterate quickly.
There's two other superpowers with this connector that I would like to mention. One is you're able to put data exchanges into Autodesk Docs folders or into BIM 360 project folders. Some people still have projects on BIM 360, so this is a way for you to still take advantage of Data Exchange capabilities. The other superpower is that you can use this connector to read data back into Revit from other sources. We won't really touch on those workflows today, except you did see them in the Rhino video where Rhino data was able to come back into Revit via this type of connector.
OK, so we covered how to get BIM data available in the cloud using Docs, data model, and data exchange. Now comes the fun part where we get to use that data in other places like in Power BI. So to get started, you'll need to download the Power BI connector. You can get this on the Autodesk app store. We just recently graduated this connector from public beta to general availability, or GA. So it's ready for production use.
You'll be asked to log in with your Autodesk account so the connector can retrieve data from your ACC hubs, and that way, you can access data exchanges and data model contained in those datas. You'll need to link your initial data source, and I highly recommend just going with the URL so then you don't have to navigate through any folders in order to find your data source. You can just grab the URL right out of the viewer when you click to view a Data Exchange, or if you click the Share button, you can copy the link from that. And you can load that into this load button. And when you do that, you are off and running and able to start working with the data.
There are two other options here in order to set the units, in case you wanted to work with metric units versus imperial units. And there's also a way to filter the data before retrieving it from the cloud. We'll talk about that in a future slide. I realize, Matt, I skipped a slide, so if you don't mind going back to it, we can just update this one. Yeah. So after you've installed the connector, you need to open Power BI and then search for the connector. You click the Load Additional Data Sources there at the bottom, and it'll bring up the dialog where you can type in Autodesk data connector, and you'll recognize it right away by the cool purple spider network icon.
And then you'll go ahead and log in and go through the steps I just mentioned. And at this point, you're working in Power BI, and you have a data source listed over on the right. So just a bit of background on Power BI. The Power BI tools refer to these widgets on the right as visualizations, and these are essentially the data widgets like tables and allocation diagrams, things like that.
What we're looking at is a powerful space allocation diagram, but we can go further than 2D data. We can also include 3D data through a custom visualization load. And that's what we're seeing here. If you click this More icon, the three dots, Power BI allows you to load in a custom PBI viz file. And this comes with the download, the install of the connector. And there should be no navigation required here. It should look directly to the right folder where it was installed, so all you have to do is click this Power BI viz and load it, and now, you're able to create the 3D viewer that goes along with the data.
This was easily the highest requested item as we were going through the beta, so we added it in the second beta, and there's only two tricks to getting it to work. First is-- I guess, three tricks. The first trick is loading the custom visual, and then as you search in the data set, you'll just search on viewer, and you'll need to load that into the visualization. So you can see that here in the purple bar. That's where you'll need to load that viewer information.
If you click one more forward, Matt. You'll need to key the information together, and we use a property called external element ID in order to do that. So you'll also want to search for external element ID and plug that into all three of those fields that are listed there. And at this point, you're pretty much ready to go.
So if you click to the next one, this is a simple visualization from Data Exchange and a table associated with it too. Voila. You're up and running with BIM data in the viewer. Now you can start mixing and matching with more elaborate tables and elaborate widgets to tell your data story.
Also, you're ready to share this dashboard. The nice thing about the way this is set up is that now, all of your data lives in this dashboard, and people you share it with are not going to need to log in with an Autodesk ID in order to see the dashboard. So it's very well-suited for sharing with stakeholders. And as Matt mentioned, you'll want to update this dashboard over time. There's no way projects are one and done, and the dashboard is not a living dashboard, so it's pretty straightforward. You just click the Update button on the icon. It's going to go retrieve the latest version of either the AEC data model or the Data Exchange. You shouldn't have to do any other work at that point.
And here are a couple of other neat features that we've added along the way, anticipating frequently asked questions that we've heard along the way. For starters, we added this prefilter capability that allows you to retrieve the data from the cloud but only retrieving what you actually need for the work you have in mind in this dashboard. So this minimizes latency and increases the loading performance so it's faster. When you work with a data model, especially, this is essential because you've got the entirety of your Revit file that's available to you through API now, and it can take a long time to retrieve all that data. So pre-filtering ahead of time will just save you a lot of work.
The second capability is having more than one viewer in a certain dashboard. So certainly, on each tab, you can have a viewer, but even within each tab, you can have more than one viewer as well. Definitely, there's a few workflows for this one and just wanted to validate that it is possible, and it does work well. The last piece that we added here was exposing the Revit element ID in the data set. So you can essentially reference back into Revit any changes that you need to make or any elements that might need parameters to be cleaned up or filled out. You can track back to that specific element.
Just an FYI, this is a screenshot of the Power Query environment, which is a table view of the data set that you've loaded in. So here also, you can remove columns of data if you wanted to do that post-processing the data into the dashboard.
So two more quick features to talk about. One is a big one, and this is linked files. So we confirmed that if you've linked multiple files together into a Revit host document and then created a Data Exchange from that host document, you'll be good to go seeing all of those different linked files in Power BI. We got this question a lot, so we wrote a community forum post about it, so you can check there for more details. In essence, you're able to visualize all of them, and then see the properties from all of those different linked files as well.
And the last feature is coming soon. In Revit 2026, you'll be able to visualize the room geometry. Now we're exporting room properties only, but you don't see the room geometry in the viewable. In Revit 2026, when you run a Data Exchange, you will be able to see that room geometry.
And there are other updates coming soon-- better performance as well as reference parameters like levels and structural materials and things like that being included as well. All right. So that was a ton of information and a ton of setup steps. So I want to close this section with two slides that, hopefully, lower your stress a little bit about getting started.
So first off, there is a quick start sample template that's included with the download of the connector. This is something out of the box that will give you data as well as the associativity between these different widgets, and you can crib off of this in order to see how the dashboard should go together. And you can also, of course, use this as a Save As situation to start building your own first dashboard before you get into anything more complex.
And the next slide is about learn content. So if you've gone to learn.autodesk.com, there's a ton of helpful videos and material created for you. And we've set this up for the Power BI workflow that we just walked through as well. There's several videos, at least nine, on Power BI, but also videos on the Autodesk Docs and the Revit workflows that we've talked about today. So if you have colleagues that couldn't make it to Autodesk University, they'll be able to watch these videos and get started. Also, if you need a refresher, you're able to go here and follow along narrated videos at your own speed. So these lists will continue to grow over time, and we'll be adding more complex workflows into this as well.
All right. So speaking of more complex workflows, let's get inspired by shining a spotlight on some of these customer examples that we've seen. This is from CRB. These guys are comparing model quantities and estimate quantities on their construction projects. So the gray bars you see are estimated, i.e. budgeted quantities, and the blue bars are actually models or remaining quantities. So this allows CRB to get an overall percent complete and also visibility into progress of each individual system.
They're also doing a really cool thing here where they're merging two different data sets together, not just the element or model data but also the ACC assets data. So that's what you see here with the field status as well as the schedule status of when the installation of these different parts should begin. This allows the user to drill down into an individual asset by selecting in the viewer and then reviewing its status and seeing how much it contributes to the overall completion of the project-- so a lot of visibility into planned versus progress of work.
And James shared this awesome quote, letting us know that Data Exchange and using it with Power BI has really unlocked model element data like never before. Automating the publishes, being able to check model-based progress, and then 4D visualization of progress along a schedule really helps save multiple hours every single week for his project teams.
And the next example is from Rogers. And these guys are also doing awesome work with steel installation. So they actually contacted us to find out when the connector would be certified by Microsoft, and we hope it will be soon. We followed up by asking them tell us more about their use case and why they need to have an automatic update provided by certification. And we're really impressed by what they showed.
So they are monitoring steel installation. First, they break down the steel installs into sequences or batches and then plot those over time on a schedule. And that's what you see here in the upper left. And if you advance one slide, Matt, with this reported progress, they can then start to estimate and attempt to predict when the steel work will finish so that other trades can get in and start doing their work as well. So this all boils down to communicating insights with subcontractors and then taking action.
So they provided this quote, obviously, steel installation being critical to success and teams wanting a daily update on how that's going. This visibility into installed and remaining is a communication tool to push subcontractors to increase staffing or work weekends to stay on schedule because when steel gets delayed, it's almost impossible for the rest of the project to stay on track. So this allows them to really mitigate risk as quickly as possible on the highest-risk items.
And if you go to the next slide, this is a mash-up of a variety of the different dashboards that we got through supporting the data. We're seeing Power BI connector being used for everything from highways to buildings to concrete to ships. So your use case with these Power BI dashboards is definitely going to be supported.
And I want to wrap up this section with a video that goes a little bit beyond Revit. So you can go ahead and hit Play on this one, Matt. So far we've been talking a lot about building and BIM, but there's no reason why CAD data coming from Civil 3D can also participate in a Power BI dashboard. In this example, we see moving bridge data from Revit into Civil 3D with a stop here in the middle with Power Automate providing a Teams notification so you can alert your team through an automated message when some data has been created and is available or has been updated.
So the Revit model comes in cleanly to Civil 3D, and it even brings parameters with it. So you can start to extend your Revit BIM data beyond the boundaries of Revit and start to see that in Civil 3D as well. But what's extra cool is now in Power BI, Civil 3D objects like corridor solids and pipe network solids and even terrain solids are imported with their attributes so you can create rich workflows, different ones in each tab on this video.
First of all, you're able to quickly navigate around a very large model using just the data widgets themselves as a navigation tool. You can also do property sets, health checking, something that Matt was demonstrating with Revit models, but you can also do now with Civil 3D models. You can start to do quantification in the Power BI context and even starting to do construction sequencing in BI as well.
So I show this to illustrate that the Revit data coming in is where we're seeing so much usage and adoption in the Power BI connector. But we fully expect CAD products, other places where rich data was locked away in files, now starting to be able to participate in these awesome data visualizations as well.
MATT ARSENAULT: Yeah, thanks, Tobias. That's awesome. I love always seeing those customer insight videos. It's really cool to see what all of our customers are building. But with that, we're going to wrap up here, and take a look at what's ahead in terms of some of the product roadmaps related to Data Exchange and Revit.
So first, you may be walking away from this and asking your question, when should I use AEC data model or Data Exchange? And realistically, it's whenever you need it. We don't want you to really think about, do I need to create a Data Exchange? Do I need to do an AEC Data model? It's really comes down to the workflow you're trying to achieve.
And, comparing that traditional files, I mean, AEC Data Model is about granularizing that data tracking files, and Data Exchange is really about interoperability between multiple applications on the same data. Both AEC Data Model and Data Exchange are cloud-hosted. Both of them have flexible query abilities through GraphQL, and they're both about granular data.
I think the biggest differentiator, and Tobias tapped into it and we talked through the AEC data model, is just the difference is what you have for trust and the amount of data. So AEC Data Model is around granularizing your entire file. So it's all the properties and all the elements that are in your Revit 2024, Revit 2025 mile, while Data Exchange is intended to be subsets of the model. So it's more of that low and medium trust workflow for you to just share the granular bits that you need as those work packages.
Well, AEC Data Model is still in that medium and high trust area because you're still sharing that entire file. But again, the difference is that you're not sharing the file anymore. You're just sharing the property data that you need. It's that granular bits, which is really what drives these businesses forward and really is going to drive the industry forward.
And so when we look at Revit in particular, so you can always visit our public roadmap, which we have online. There's a QR code here on the bottom right for you to just scan with your phone. So I'll pause here real quick so you can make sure that you can grab that. But that will take you to our public roadmap where you can see the different disciplines across architecture, MEP, structure, and you can start to understand all the projects that we have in progress, what's planned, and what's really in the future. When it comes to data, you can see this in all three disciplines by scrolling down to the collaboration and ecosystems grouping where you'll find everything related to data.
So you can see here, you can even click on the individual cards in the roadmap. That'll blow you up so that way you can get into more details and understand really, what is this feature all about? And you can also subscribe to these cards for updates. But more importantly, you can also give feedback to us. You can let us know how important this feature is for you. Is it critical for your day-to-day business, or is it something that's nice to have, or no, this really isn't for us. But you can also add comments so we can hear directly from you. And I can tell you, the entire product team read these every single day, so we always see these, and a lot of times, we end up reaching out to our customers that we hear these comments from so we can engage in that conversation. So this is a fantastic way to engage with the product teams directly at Autodesk.
And so when we think about data today and what we saw with Power BI, there's probably plenty of questions around, what data can I have? As I mentioned today, it's all about properties, for AEC data model at least. So in that standpoint, we're going to continue to talk about where we're headed. So right now, we're focused on enabling you to have geometry access in the AEC data model. As Tobias mentioned, there's geometry and properties of Data Exchange. We're doing the same with AEC data model-- the ultimate goal that you can create data exchanges from the AEC data model, so you can start to share sub subsets of that granular data.
But also, we're working on improving the latency of that data. As I mentioned, you can say it's when you publish, but when we really talked about where we're headed and how we can improve that digital thread, that really relies on being able to have access in near real time. So that's why, when you're using Revit cloud work sharing, every time you sync with central, we're working to get that data directly into AEC Data Model. So no longer do you have to wait for a daily publish, a weekly publish or even longer than that. Every time you sync with central and your Revit cloud model, that data will automatically be put into AEC data model so you have near real-time access to all the data inside of Revit.
Next, we're working on the availability of more data in the data model itself. Today, you don't have access to the different layers of a wall, a floor, a ceiling, and that's really hindering for quality takeoffs, for quantity takeoffs, as well as doing sustainability workflows. So that's why we're opening up to make sure that all of that information inside of your walls and your multi-compound elements is available to the data model.
As well as the relationships between elements-- you can't have a building without all of the relationships that make it up. Is this window hosted to this wall? Is it this door inside of that wall? Is it on this floor? All of that's critical for us to understand buildings as well as anything inside of the AEC industry. So we're working to make sure that those relationships are brought through from Revit into the data model so you can access them without Revit even being open.
And finally, we're really expanding into making sure that we can also have spatial relationship data. We need to have intelligent ways for you to understand, what are all the elements in this room? It's a key critical part that customers have been asking for Revit, and so we're working on that to open up both Revit and the AEC Data Model and all the connected applications. And along with just the data of your model elements is also things like analytical results, whether this be structural analysis or energy analysis. We want to make sure that you're connected across the entire thread for every part of the phase.
So this is just a taste of some of the things that we have planned and what we're working on when it comes to opening access to data from Revit. With that, I'll hand it back to Tobias to talk about Data Exchange.
TOBIAS HATHORN: Yeah. Incredible, Matt. I love the public roadmap, and Data Exchange is practicing the same method, transparently showing what we've released, what's in progress, and where we're headed next. So this is a screenshot of where we are today, what connectors are available, and we couldn't quite fit them all on one screenshot. So as you visit the homepage for Data Exchange, finding the public roadmap, you can even scroll down and see that there's more than visible here. If you can advance to the next one.
I'll just talk about these six cards today. The ones that are most relevant are the ones that are in the now column. We just talked quite a bit about Power BI in GA, the second card there. That just came live here in the end of September, where we're recording, and by the time we get to AU, we may even have an update to that. But the key takeaway is that this is a scalable solution and a performance solution. We spent a lot of time in beta going through and iterating to get the scalability set up and the stability set up. So hopefully soon, we'll even have Microsoft certification. We'll talk about that in just a moment.
The card above that is interesting because ACC Bridge is a really powerful technology, a tool in ACC that allows you to bridge folders full of information between hubs so you don't have to invite other companies into your hub and lets data ownership be more clear between different companies. So it's really a peanut butter and jelly situation where you don't have to share source files with a bridged folder anymore. You could even share just the Data Exchange of a subset of your model data into a bridged folder so that another hub can consume just that subset of model, not your entirety of your source file. So it's another really great way to protect your IP and data exchanges now participate in bridged folders.
In the next column, these are projects we have underway right now is an ability to import IFC into a Data Exchange with the intent of being able to display that in Power BI, as well as load that into Revit. The thought here is that you're not consuming entire IFC files, but just subsets of that IFC file. So we're providing capabilities to do that. Now it's in a private beta. If anybody has interest in joining the private beta, please contact us. But otherwise, look for that to come to public beta soon.
We're also excited about automation opportunities and the ability to create data exchanges from the outset of your project for either key views or key filters that you've set up. So we're working on an automation capability using GraphQL APIs to create work packages from day one of a project that only automatically update and increase in content as the project goes on.
And then in the later column, these are things we'll be working on over the next several months. We're going to work to bring more of the connectors from beta state to a GA state. And the key there is maturity in terms of stability and performance both. And underpinning all of those connectors is the SDK. So at that point, when the SDK is released, anybody could pick up the SDK and make their own custom connectors. They can even make the connectors do the things that they want them to do that may not be available in the connectors that we've built and provided today.
So this is a very important distinction between existing linked file workflow, which is great, but not really an opportunity to customize that. With a connector SDK, you'll be able to build the custom workflows that you want and your company needs. If you can advance one more, Matt.
We would love your support in upvoting a Microsoft certification. If you do a Google search-- I'm afraid the QR code won't work because I didn't get it updated in time for this video, but there is an ability to upvote a particular Microsoft certification ideas card, and the title of it is there-- Power BI Connectors to consume Autodesk Design Model Data. And right now, Microsoft is looking for us to justify the certification, and we need your support to do that. A couple of these quotes that are up there now really warm my heart and inspire the work that we do every day. So if you feel strongly that you want to see this connector certified, please go, and vote for it as well.
And I think that brings us to the close, Matt. Thank you for watching this recording.