New Business Models of Convergence Customers and Their Need for a Platform

AMY MARKS: Hello, and welcome to "New Business Models of Convergence Customers and their need for a Platform." I have to end. I just realized my title is wrong.

PRESENTER: No problem.

AMY MARKS: Let's start for the beginning.

PRESENTER: Do you have the opening slide there?

AMY MARKS: That is my opening slide. I just figured it. All right.

PRESENTER: OK.

AMY MARKS: I'm going to begin again.

PRESENTER: Go ahead. Go ahead, do your count again.

AMY MARKS: Ready to go. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Hello, and welcome to "New Business Models of Convergence Customers and their need for a Platform." Please note the safe harbor statement. If you'd like to review this at length, you can pause here and read our statement.

My name is Amy Marks. I'm the Vice President of Industrialized Construction in the Customer Success Organization here at Autodesk. And for those of you who know me, I travel the world talking about convergence, industrialized construction, and the future of work. I'm also the ambassador to one of the largest prefabrication conferences advancing prefabrication, which is happening in March. And I've been a trainer and a panel of experts for many different governments and sitting on many different boards around the world.

So thank you for joining me here today. My given nickname in the industry is actually the Queen of Prefab, for those of you who have caught the series on the Autodesk YouTube site. Think we are running at about 7 million-plus views right now. So thank you for watching that, and I hope you'll come and join us if you haven't seen the series yet.

The question I have for you is, are you ready for change? Change is actually formulaic. This is Dan Miller's formula for change. Most of you who know me, I have this in almost every one of my presentations. It's how I live my life. It's how I approach change in business. And it reads, "Change equals D times V times F has to be greater than R."

First, in order to change, you have to be dissatisfied with the way things are now. Either you want to aspire to be something else or something greater, or you're unhappy with the current state of your business. Then there needs to be a vision for what's possible. And I think at any one of the amazing parts of AU, you can see amazing vision for what's possible here. But next, it gets a little tricky, and you have to have the first concrete steps of action that are going to actually allow you to overcome resistance, both internal at your organizations and external as you move to transform and change.

What's going on right now that I'm talking about change in our ecosystem of industries? We're seeing convergence happen. Convergence in technologies, convergence of process, convergence of whole industries. It's one of the reasons why I love industrialized construction, because you're seeing the convergence of design, make, operate, and inform. And because of that, we're seeing changing business models. And I think we have to talk about how the change has really created new types of customers, new future states that people are looking for.

But before we do that, let's take a little quick recap on one of the future states that I like to look at, which is, actually, industrialized construction. So again, many of you know me as a subject matter around industrialized construction. And it's the application of manufacturing techniques to our built environment. It's industry convergence at its finest. And, actually, we're looking at things like technology enablers and process enablers down at our foundational level with things.

We are highly instrumented these days with looking at things like IoT and machine learning and AI all around the world. Anything we're doing is highly instrumented. We're collecting lots of data around all of our activities, even in our daily lives. And that's creating a lot of big data, and it's also allowing for analytics. So we can use that data that we have in technology in what we're doing, how we're procuring things, how we're purchasing things, how we're installing things, how we're actually putting them in place and fabricating them, and really apply some analytics to that.

The cloud and open platforms are really a big part of that technology enabler because we're able to really share information in the cloud with multiple stakeholders. Our Forge platform-- sorry, our Autodesk platform is built on Forge, so I like to call it our operating system. In some ways, if you think about my iPhone has an operating system, our platform has an operating system as well as developers' platform called Forge. So that's a big part of what's going on in industrialized construction today, as well as process enablers, like predictive manufacturing tools, where we can understand simulation and emulation.

Building information modeling-- and, hopefully, you've all caught what's going on in our incubation at manufacturing inform design. How do we inform the I in BIM to become more intelligent and informed by the way and the rules and constraints that we actually make things? And then many of you have heard of Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, DfMA. I like to think of it as, actually, Data for Manufacturing and Assembly because I believe in our ecosystem. It's not the responsibility of the designer, but we need the designer to be able to consume data to enable manufacturing, ease of manufacturing, and ease of assembly once that building has been designed in such a way.

And so that's one of the reasons why I think manufacturing informed design, informing BIM, is so important. And then the physicality of what's going on in industrialized construction-- that's that product-- sorry, that's that pre-fabrication continuum. We're seeing a lot of productization happening around there, where process that was downstream is becoming products upstream, which, at the end, becomes just products. Productization is a verb on purpose because many of the folks that have been in the process construction business are actually figuring out how to be more like manufacturers and create products.

So that-- we can use that data and actually use advanced building methodologies, using robotics and automation and things like additive manufacturing. So I like to think of industrialized construction as the house that I see built. Sometimes, we'll say IC for short, so that you hear as we're talking about this.

I think, why now? You have to ask yourself, why are things changing right now? Why is convergence happening? And that's because there's a lot of market characteristics that are actually changing customer demand, and the rules and regulations are changing. Lots of things going on in industrialization. McKinsey report actually said that in the next, at this point, 12 to 13 years, more than half of what is being built will be built offsite in factories and then moved site, in situ, to be put into place.

Now, that doesn't mean just-- yes, whole parts of buildings, but lots of places where you're hitting the tipping point. That means pretty much the whole building is either coming from a factory or must accept things that are made in factories.

But we also are seeing emerging disruptions, like digitalization of product and process, a lot of new materials and new entrants into the marketplace. And future industry dynamics are changing. Inclusive of things like product-based approaches and consolidation is happening. We're seeing a lot of specialization around sustainability as well and internationalization.

In this survey, 66% of the respondents think that industrialization and digitalization have the highest impact. But in one to three years, I think it was 3/4 of those studied said that product-based approach would have the highest impact on their business in their world right now. So I think product-based approach is not project anymore but product.

And so we're seeing that we can no longer live in the world of assumption-based design. And that is one of the biggest problems that we're trying to solve for is that uncertainty with assumption-based design. And right now, it's addressed today with a very iterative process that's painful and expensive with a lot of risk and uncertainty. And the opportunity for Autodesk and our customers is the way in which we connect our tools and enable new tools and capabilities, these solutions that allow our processes to work at scale.

So let's talk a little bit about that assumption-based design. We all know how it happens. It's kind of a sad story. But I'm going to tell you anyway because I think it's important for us to recognize what we need to overcome.

These days, a lot of architects create their designs based on assumptions as we said. They either click on static Revit data on their desktops, or they use some sort of geometric space allocation, or some sort of copy and paste from the last project they did. And they're using a lot of placeholders.

And so in this case, I'm showing a geometric box that the architect in this case is actually designing for a stadium. And let's call that the space behind the men's bathroom stalls. And it's called the bathroom battery. That's actually a product that's manufactured in factories by some of our largest mechanical manufacturers and subcontractors.

But most people, because there is no connection between what is actually made, will pull the last one they made, whether it was a 10 stall or 20 stall. Or they'll just create space not knowing exactly what it should be. They hand that downstream to general contractors.

And the project managers have no manufacturing detail potentially or not enough space where they think it might be. So they might see a 10 stall where a 20 stall needs to exist. They don't really necessarily always have the right and complete data. Sometimes, their estimates, not often, but they're estimating and actually not figuring out costs because mostly the data can be incomplete and static.

And so they then pass that down to the actual makers, the mechanical, electrical, plumbing subcontractor in this case. And there's not enough space to actually do that assembly you see there now in it's form. And they can't make it really efficiently based on what they've been given. And there's no detailed engineering, build materials, or costs or fabrication information because, again, it was made on an assumption.

Now, here's where it gets really tricky. They send it off either to their fabricator, but at the same time, they're sending it downstream to the building product manufacturers through a distribution model that gets very fragmented. So that building product manufacturer might make 80% of what's on that actual assembly. They don't actually get one RFP for all of it. They're getting multiple fragmented RFPs from multiple makers. And it's hard for them to even have any visibility that that's actually the pieces and part that they're bidding for that assembly.

That information comes back to the fabricator. And they're basically stuck trying to make it work. And they're coming up with some bespoke one-off assembly typically, which we call prefabrication in this case. Because most of the MEP subcontractors these days, the majority of them are actually fabricating things inside of their fabrication facilities.

And they're constrained by the designer's assumption. They're going to give the best details they can to say the way in which they can make it work as a one off or at least ask for more space or different contexts for the geometry if they need it. They send it back to that general contractor, who sends it back to the architect or the engineer. And no doubt, it doesn't meet their original intentions if there were some. But what's worse is we're doing this around thousands of interdependent assemblies. And if you don't believe me, listen to some of our customers that will tell you the same.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

STAN CHIU: What we're doing now, we're beginning to treat. For years, we've heard, just design it, and we'll figure out how to prefab it. Do whatever you want. We'll figure it out. That doesn't work.

AMY MARKS: Right.

STAN CHIU: Because the rules, the data, the information comes in after the design is done. And then it throws us into this monster rework cycle.

AMY MARKS: And that's not working.

STAN CHIU: Oh, it's a nightmare.

BENJAMIN CALLAM: And one of the things that struck me working in the design field was that there was-- especially in a hard bid process, there's no feedback loop at all.

AMY MARKS: Right.

BENJAMIN CALLAM: I'm literally sitting in an office detailing something without any ability to check with the actual people who make that thing in a meaningful way and collaborate with them around that information. So it's about bringing the making into the design--

AMY MARKS: I love that.

BENJAMIN CALLAM: --versus sort of creating a design and hoping it can be made.

AMY MARKS: Exactly.

BENJAMIN CALLAM: We have to kind of flip the script, I think.

[END PLAYBACK]

AMY MARKS: A nightmare. Hoping that it can be made. This is the state of our ecosystem now. But business models because of that are actually changing. We can no longer live with the results of assumption-based design. And because of that, you're going to see lots of different companies that used to be siloed, where even in our world, the way in which we looked at customers may have actually been in silos.

But most of our customers are starting to look more like this. Characteristics of those customers are they're innovators. They want a competitive advantage. They're usually first movers. And they are often some of our most disruptive clients. They're the disruptors that we all think about. They have transformational business change that's usually led by their C-staff, not just the CTO or the CIO or in their CAD managers or people that are on the line.

But the words and the phrases you'll hear them say that can allow you to recognize that their business model has changed is that they talk about platform. They talk about common data environments for all. They talk about connective and predictive data, things like interoperability between the Autodesk products and also with the ones they might use that are either third party competitors or even their proprietary software. They're all fighting margin erosion due to a cross-discipline failure. Often and outside and within their companies, they're working with key stakeholders to understand how they can all make money and be more productive or more sustainable on work that they're actually either designing, putting in place, or owning.

So we hear the convergence companies talking about these types of topics. But they actually break down into a few different types of convergence customers. So you'll see here, we're seeing a transition between the owner, the building product manufacturer, contractors, and the architects, engineers. I'm just going to name a few.

But we're seeing them become something else. We're seeing them become convergence type companies, like serial owners or solution aggregators or product and systems integrators and even real generative designers. So start thinking about, do you fit into one of these buckets? And we'll talk about that maybe later during question and answer. But let's go through some of these in detail.

Most people know what a building owner is. They need buildings that they own. And they build and operate. But they're turning into more serial owners. They don't just need one building. They own many buildings across their portfolio. And they're striving for operational consistency typically across many different geos or project sites. And they're programmatic in nature, not project centric as they think about things.

What are they dissatisfied about as we talked about? They're struggling to usually achieve some consistency. And certainty for their businesses, their buildings are really oftentimes a means to an end, whether they're data centers or pharmaceutical or automotive manufacturers. So those buildings actually are how they operate their core business. The building is not their business.

Some of the outcomes they're actually looking for, they're looking for certainty. It's more important than short-term savings. They want transparency and certainty of cost and schedule and operability. They want to reduce time to market with their money at less risk. And they want optimum flexibility, right? Optimal flexibility. They want visibility. They always talk transparency and alignment with their supporting ecosystem partners, including, these days, a transparent global supply chain of partners.

Because they're all trying to reduce variability. They want to own their own data for use in analytics. And they want predictive insights for better business outcomes and often for better sustainability outcomes. They envision solutions, like IFM as an example, to include the whole building and not just the equipment they own if they own factories.

They want things like true digital twins. They don't just want asset management. They may want planning twins. They may want climate twins. They want all kinds of data so they can actually achieve the outcomes that they're looking for.

Then we have building product manufacturers. And we're seeing them actually become more solution aggregators. They don't want to be reliable suppliers. They want to be true partners in this. And so the convergence persona of that solution aggregator is-- remember how I told you they're way down? They didn't even make it onto my slide.

They manufacture building products, but they want to aggregate them into larger optimized assemblies or solutions that inform the design up front, right? They're trying to get to the front of the process, create larger and larger assemblies. They want adjacencies of many of their products if it's not in an assembly. They want to get more of their products on to each one of these programs.

And in this case, they used to make the strut. They are now making that entire rack in some of the cases that you see here. They are unhappy because they're currently downstream of the decisions and want to move upstream because they get sometimes value engineered or swapped out.

We all call it protecting the spec in our business. And they're further down and even more disconnected from the place they want to be, which is to inform the owner and the contractors. They have the contractors in the distribution models in the middle.

Some of the outcomes they're actually looking for is they want a seat at the table to influence design and operations criteria with their best solutions and more of them. It's sort of the opposite of being commoditized. And many of them are building their back end right now to enable that data to do more for them when they get the seat at the table up front.

So they want more visibility, transparency, and alignment. And they want to meet and shape that owner and end user requirement and the design choices so that they can stay sticky with the customers and provide added value not just up front but in the lifespan of the building in service and warranty work and things like that where they stick around. So they also want to own their own data and sell more things so they can do it in the most efficient way.

But this really includes real-time data they're looking for. They want to know when people are actually specifying what they do. They want to make sure that the data that people are using is real time. And they want to be able to predict service and maintenance and replacement sales. And again, you may have heard a lot about this. They want further instrumentation when discussing digital twins not just to equipment but to the rest of the building that they actually have product inside of it.

Then you hear a lot about our contractors. And they're kind of trying to move up to become makers just like that manufacturer. But they take a first step usually at a product system or send a systems integrator. So they either want to make more things, or they want to integrate more things.

Right, so we know what a contractor is. They are both general contractors and subcontractors. They coordinate and execute the construction of building, services, labor, and material. They're evolving as time is going on. And some are on an evolutionary path right now beyond the make to not just make but also integrate.

But they're mutually exclusive. Some are just making and some are actually integrating. And then some are doing both, right? So like subcontractors, many-- even my general contractors want to become manufacturers and have opened up multiple fabrication facilities at the general contractor level that are actually becoming both makers and integrators. They want to move their value up front and not downstream of initial decisions as well.

Their dissatisfaction is they're struggling to achieve consistency, grueling coordination and duplication of data due to designs, really not being informed by the way things are made and how they're built. They have a loss of production on job sites due to supply chain issues these days, high, high variability that they're trying to get a hold of, and piecemeal construction.

There is obviously a lack of skilled labor these days. And there's an aging workforce. They're trying to figure out how to make digital natives enabled on the job site. So again, a diversity of perspective and diversity and belonging as they look for a diversified labor force.

They have, remember, very little upside and infinite downside. One of my subcontractor friends recently told me that he's tired of making unique custom snowflakes. But he's even more tired of being a gambler where he has infinite downside but only a very small upside potential.

And they're looking for some of the outcomes. Like, they want to win and execute profitable projects. They want to reduce risk and increase their own profitability. But they want to have predictive certainty on cost and schedule and their supply chain availability of their materials and assemblies.

They want to really manage and leverage buying power. And the only way they can do that is through programmatic type decisions. When they're stuck oftentimes in a project-centric world, that project centricity really weighs them down.

They would love to have clear procurement hand offs to reduce risk. They also want to scale and automate their execution process, including modeling, making, and executing work in factories and on site, and making sure that the two, that they understand how to do the most successful integrations.

They want to track that data from the conceptualization of those parts up front all the way through things like digital twin. And they want to do more with less because their resources are really scarce. And we are in, I would say, an emergency crisis scenario in our ecosystem.

Architects and engineers, we know what a designer is and an engineer. Obviously, they design and engineer buildings for the end-user requirements. But in the convergence persona, they truly want to become generative designers where they are using technology and the platform and solutions to maximize and optimize the process that supports their future state.

And really, they're very highly data dependent upon the other convergence personas because they're not necessarily generating the make data. But they're collecting the requirements, consuming that make data, and they're actually disseminating it in the most effective way to make sure that their end state for their users is actually what they were looking for up front.

So they want to be able to use technology to evaluate parameters and goals and constraints. They want to design spaces with possibilities, playing it out with algorithms. They want that data to arrange with generative tools and technology.

And again, they're not normally generating that make data. They want to consume it. They want to disseminate it. They want to use their domain expertise to put parameters around it. They are typically these days, the most innovative ones, dissatisfied because they don't actually always have complete information at their fingertips in real time. And the end result sometimes doesn't meet their design intent and experience.

But they get things like-- they hear words that they don't like, like value engineering and redesigning later in the design process and filling in the information as they have it. You don't really get paid for that work. And they really want the outcomes where their ability, time, and freedom to focus on critical aspects of the program is there and enabled because they're creating efficiencies around drawing production for things that can easily be produced by others.

And they want to focus on all the things that actually enable their artistry. And they want to enable design for manufacturing assembly, that data for DFMA, and inform BIM with manufacturing data. Why? Because it makes their job-- it gives them freedom. It makes their job easier to focus on the things they want to focus on if they're not doing things, I always say, like designing fire stairs or something that a maker has already productized. They don't need to spend their time doing that when they can spend their time on the things that are really, really special and prioritizing their domain expertise, both in the physical form and the digital form of the workflows.

So you heard me say data a lot. And it's very important that we think about data because it's, again, not about design necessarily for manufacturing assembly, it's going to be more heavily reliant upon the data. Excuse me.

So why now? Well, productization is already happening. We know this. If you just look at this slide from a couple of years ago at the Advancing Prefabrication show, GSK came and talked about the fact that they are productizing their manufacturing facilities. And you can see right there that that is not just geometric space. Those are actual products that have been defined in advance of combining those for site adaptation for the buildings that they are now building.

And so at that same show, we did a survey. And 82% of the leading AEC companies are ready to find themselves as a convergence customer, crossing over one of those silos, looking like one of those new personas. And in fact, 79% said that they're on a journey for productization.

Some of the people going first, the heavy MEP, mechanical, electrical, plumbing subcontractors and the generals that have adapted. But also, we're seeing heavy structure move in that direction first. That's where the money is at in these buildings. So that complexity and that cost is where it's starting for productization and has been for about 25 years now, 20 years.

I walked into a shop recently. They were showing me pictures from the time I was in college, maybe just out of high school, of all the cool prefabrication that they had done over the years. This is not new. But we are talking about now the difference of product versus prefabrication, some of those pictures that I saw on the wall from 20, 25 years ago. And I've been in the business a long time. Even I was in the business back then prefabricating many things.

The difference in product and prefabrication is that prefab actually happens downstream. Products actually inform design. In order to do that, we have to productize the data.

So I always like to say, as you saw in that last picture, no architect actually designed the alternator inside those generators. They know that they come in certain standard sizes. They understand what a generator-- they design around the capacities they need for the generator. They don't actually get into the pieces and parts inside the generator. But so prefabrication happens downstream like the picture you just saw. And that is a little bit more bespoke, but we have to productize the data in order to get there.

Many of you saw our CEO in 2021 talk about the fact that so much of the uncertainty that plagues the construction industry can be addressed by bringing the makers, those manufacturers, to the front of the many different phases of designing a building. And so that is our incubation that is going on right now partially as well as there are some other things going on in our platform play that is allowing manufacturing to inform design.

And so what does that mean? It means we need to enable dynamic products, not just products that are standard and you can't actually adjust them as architects may need to depending on site adaptation, but enabling dynamic products that you can actually adjust, making sure that they are still manufacturable. So understanding the rules and constraints that you can identify in different mechanical CAD products that exist, ours and others, to make sure that any requested variation still remains manufacturable.

The second thing is about intelligent design choices. It's going to allow architects to actually work in their tools that they're used to in the authoring products like AutoCAD and Revit. But it's going to enable them to discover and view dynamic products and customize them for their needs at the moment and hopefully include as many unique instances that are required. But it's going to make the AI more intelligent.

And again, we have products right now that do that like in InfraWorks. If you looked at that particular product around bridges, that's exactly what InfraWorks actually does. And so we want to make sure that we're using the right tool to define the right information so that our authoring tools can actually consume those.

The last is actually we want to make sure we're enabling automated output so that not just can we consume it in design, but we can push it back out into the cloud and make sure that it can be consumed by that maker to extract that information for the project so that they can make it using hopefully some automation and automatically create things, like project documentation, like drawings, bills of material, the sustainability information, but also the information that's necessary to combine for the machines in order to make those things in industry type 4.0 conversation. So combining these three capabilities actually make manufacturing-informed design possible for our customers. And I think there's a few classes and courses around that as we're here today.

Ultimately, we want to have a data backbone attached to the physical product and then productize the journey that that physical product takes once the maker has defined it all the way through assembly and making sure that it has the information it needs for things like asset management and digital twin information because we have amazing manufacturing tools here at Autodesk. But you can't actually use any of them unless you make products for the most part. Really, that's the only way that you can optimize using our manufacturing.

So it's more about how do we enable the convergence of the industries and not just inside of the design and make manufacturing tool? But we have to make sure that we're enabling a reason for those companies that have process right now to productize so that they can use some of the amazing manufacturing tools that we have in our make portfolio. And ultimately, we want to enable this to have digital twins, so building on the BIM and MID model and standardizing data structures so we can enable repeatable and scalable process and solutions that get you to where you want to go in your future state.

The next question you have to then ask, which I'm asked a lot, is is there one ring to rule them all? And I would say, no. Let's talk about what a platform actually means.

So this is my iPhone. You saw me bring it up before. This is Apple. What you have to understand about Autodesk is there are unique business cases and platform workflows for each of these convergence personas, right? So I am a 51-year-old woman that lives in New Jersey. I use this platform very differently than a 23-year-old with five kids that might live in the Middle East or somebody that is using it in Asia with a different persona. Same platform, different applications, different solutions that we combine to enable our lives to be better.

And so we have to recognize and work with those convergence customers to enable this business transformation on our platform. And I can only tell you these things, but I don't feel like we can do it without our customers. And really, only working hand in hand through places like the consulting organization, the customer success organization here at Autodesk, can we help you enable business transformation and really change the conversation so that not only can you expand the capabilities that you'd like, but also we're growing in platform readiness, customers and Autodesk alike, through building and executing optimized workflows and opportunities for reusability at scale. And for us to all utilize these solutions that get us to our future state, we really have to make sure that we're connecting those platform solutions and capturing and implementing those solutions across your business and across the Autodesk platform, enabling that through Forge, and making sure that you understand that we can enable other software, not just ours, but third party.

I like to use the example that on my phone lives Apple Maps. But also, Waze lives on this and Google Maps. And really, it's your choice. I never use Apple Maps. I always use Waze. On the flip side, this platform has made what comes with my phone better. So if you think about websites, you used to just look websites up on this. But now, my phone works better because I can click on the phone number. And it actually makes our lives better, right?

So we're helping to enable change and growth for your business. And we are also growing as a platform company, so we have the ability to enhance each of our products because of it. And so I always like to think of that example of my phone working better because of the Apple platform being open to lots of other businesses to put apps on my phone.

And for us, an example might be Revit generative design may be more effective one day and is a fantastic tool today. But if it's connected to more manufacturing-informed design through Forge because of all the cool product data that we can get from lots of different apps and lots of different makers and adding those algorithms to exercise that capability is only going to make Revit generative design or even our Fusion generative design better. We don't have all the needed capabilities in the future state yet. But I think working together, that's the key, we all will.

So I came to Autodesk because I believe we are the Apple in the platform story for this ecosystem. Apple didn't just make a better phone. They changed the way we live. And we believe the platform mindset will change the way we work. But you are all a part of shaping and creating that vision.

So in order to understand the difference between a product and platform, we think about it like this. A product is a tool or package set of tools from one company unlike a platform, which is a portfolio of products and a surrounding ecosystem of resources. In a product, everything's sort of contained within that package, and it's designed to work together. The value from software products in working in a platform is that you're thinking about features but really about connectivity, right? So it has a value for that openness to enable better features and connectivity through the ecosystem, and that combination is where the value is.

It's challenging to add new tools and tool sets to products. But the platform is the ability to connect external tools and teams and data and processes. That's what makes it really special. Again, making my life better the way in which I use my platform versus somebody else. And that's a very different value proposition that I think most are used to talking about in our ecosystem.

So if you think about what's going on here, there's proof of this. So usage of the platform has been growing rapidly. I mean, just look at the jump we've seen even in the past couple of years for API calls. And I'm sure there'll be an update to this even during this show where you're seeing 240 billion API calls annually. And that was last year's number. I'm sure the number keeps going up this year. And customers that kicked off their platform journey with us on that early end of this chart are obviously seeing some of that benefit.

And so you saw us talk about last year. Moving forward, we know that to enable better outcomes for these convergence customers, we have to move away from thinking about individual products associated with individual disciplines. And in that world where industries are blending and converging, we need services that work across roles and regions and industries. We're making significant incremental steps towards this future with Fusion 360 and our Autodesk Construction Cloud built on Forge and all the great work that's happening with our biggest customers in the customer success organization.

And we'll continue on that path to unify the systems. And there's some great news talking about that during Autodesk University this year so that collaborators shouldn't be worried about whether they're working in one of our tools or another. Data is simply moving fluidly between all disciplines. This is really going to allow industry-best practices to cross-pollinate and fuel the way we work entirely with new ways of working. That's why industrial construction is so important to me but also things like solutions, like integrated factory model. And that virtuous cycle of innovation is what we're building here at Autodesk. And that is really the future platform vision.

So I'll ask you, what's in it for you? How are you going to cure some of the dissatisfaction and take your first concrete steps of action? Right now, your data probably lives in a lot of different systems. It's hard to access. And it means you're more likely to disappear into that data void, this important information.

I believe that we can help connect your data and make sure that you can take advantage of it and understand how the outcomes can increase productivity, profitability, and also efficiency in these new business models. And that's really what the customer success org is poised to do.

So we know that many of you have been buying one product. Now, you're buying more than one product. And you're connecting those products on Forge. And you're seeing an ecosystem actually happen where you want to connect not just our products but your products and other people's products and create different solutions that get you on your future state where you want to go. And so I know that this is happening all the time.

And again, for those of you who think about open platforms, this is an example of the ecosystem of partners just in our Construction Cloud. That's exciting. And probably, there are 50 more I didn't get since this slide was made. That's really exciting. But we have to know which partners are the right ones to use at the right time. And convergence customers need to truly understand and map out their solutions in order to get to their future state.

So you've heard me say this word solutions. So what does that mean? It means where the intersection of your business, our customers businesses, and Autodesk technology and other technology can actually be deployed to align and complement. It's very layered. And you'll see that's a productization solution on the right there, which has our products and other people's products and competitive products inside of it. But there's also mapped out workflows and integrations and capabilities. It's the interconnection of the platform ecosystem that really makes that solution work for that customer.

And so solutions actually form future states. So in this case, if you're thinking about from moving from a fabricator to a manufacturer, this might be one of the maps that you'll see in how to get from your current to your future state. This is a solution map to show you that it starts with CDE. You may move to productization, manufacturing-informed design, integrated factory modeling, and then maybe a digital factory and digital twins.

And so again, there are maturities that you have for each of those depending on how far you want to go with these. But we can't look at this like one ring to rule them all even for one solution. We have to think about how this works. It's a plan of action made up of a combination of known and possibly new solutions that are forming all the time with our biggest customers and some of our most innovative customers.

These are value-driven future states, true business transformation with return on investment. And our customers are succeeding. And it's really creating a flywheel effect with more data, more users, and more capabilities for people to get better outcomes for their businesses. And I think that's the important thing that we have to recognize.

Why is it so important that we work together? Well, 40% of the cost of a building is actually transactional waste. We have to stop those iterative process that we call coordination meetings in lots of cases. We've got to really design buildings with what we know can be made in real time with real products.

And I think that's important for us to recognize as a vision for the future state because after that transactional waste, 40% of what we're purchasing is ending up in our landfills. That's construction waste that can be avoided through things like productization, manufacturing-informed design, and a platform of connected data to make sure that we're designing with the most efficient products that can actually enable the outcomes that we're looking for, aided by things like generative design and all of the amazing tools that exist on this planet, ours and others on our platform.

So I think that's why it's really important. For those of you who want to reach out to me, again, you can check out the streaming show that is on the Autodesk YouTube site, or you can reach me on any social media platform as QueenofPrefab. And I do respond to all of my-- when people reach out to me.

And I'm here as a resource for all of you and all of the great companies. So this is not about a one-way conversation. This is about learning from each other and actually bringing the level up of all of our success. So I appreciate your time today. Thank you for joining me at Autodesk University. And I'll be answering questions live. Thank you so much.