Futures Briefing: Autodesk Informed Design

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RYAN MCMAHON: We are almost there. It's the end of AU. If your experience has been anything like mine, your brains are full, your minds are open, and you're inspired by what you've learned here today. We just have a short presentation. I talked to the audio guy. He says, I have five hours of battery life, so get ready. No, it won't be five hours.

My name is Ryan McMahon. I'm the General Manager of the Informed Design Incubation team here at Autodesk. And we are working on capabilities that allow our customers to embrace industrialized construction.

And so we're here to talk to you about how we perceive the opportunity of industrialized constructions, what we think that our customers can do, and how we can work together to make that-- to help transform the industry and make that reality come true.

I'm sure by now each of you could recite the safe harbor statement, so we won't go into it in much detail. The short version of this is we have an opportunity to share with you our ideas about the future. But don't hold us to them. They might not come to fruition directly.

For our presentation today, I wanted to talk about three key areas. One, provide an overview on how we perceive the industrialized construction opportunity, how we think about IC, how we define industrialized construction, what are some of the patterns that we see the way that people need to work to get value out of industrialized construction?

And given that my team works on capabilities that help our customers adopt this, I want to take a little bit of time to share with you some of the ideas that we have and some of the capabilities that we have made commercially available to our customers that illustrate that pattern of working and delivering industrialized construction.

And given this is a futures briefing, we need to talk a little bit about, where do we go from here? How do we expand our capabilities? How are we going to leverage industrialized construction to transform the industry?

All right. And with that, we'll get started with the industry overview point of view. So our vision for industrialized construction has three particular dimensions to it. One, for the industry. How do we improve sustainability of the built environment?

That is the single biggest thread streaming through all of the issues around construction, sustainability, waste, delivering things faster, making them more affordable as well. So we want to improve sustainability for the built environment and reduce construction waste.

For our customers, we want to change the way that you design and make buildings. We want to provide new methods that allow you to do it faster, higher quality, more reliably, and get significantly better results.

And for our company, as we're thinking about this as an opportunity, we have a unique opportunity to converge both our AEC and our manufacturing capabilities to bring them to together to build new capabilities or deliver new capabilities for our customers.

We think industrialized construction will be highly disruptive. The traditional AEC workflows will-- industrialized construction will complement the traditional AEC workflows. And it's important to understand the distinction between these things.

So when we look at traditional AEC processes, the design processes are bespoke. We start from scratch for every single project. We finish that project. We don't carry much forward. We don't necessarily learn from that.

But with the opportunity with industrialized construction is to standardize some of the things that we design with to leverage reuse of our design elements of our products and to capture that information and use it to create a continuous improvement loop and get better over time.

In the traditional construction environment, everyone drives to a particular site. They perform their work. They're out in the environment. It could be wet. It could be cold. There's many different stakeholders on site working together. And it can be a very high-risk environment, whereas with industrialized construction performed in an on-site-- or sorry, in an off-site environment, in a controlled environment, in a factory, you have the opportunity to work much more efficiently, much more safely, to implement more controls around quality and deliver much better results.

And the last component of this that's really different between these two things is we manufacture today four traditional AEC workflows when we are doing prefabrication. We identify at a certain point in the building project that, hey, there are opportunities to make some of these components in a factory and deliver them and assemble them on site.

But the scope that we can apply that to is really a single project. And that doesn't give us the repeatability that's required to really get the benefits of industrialized construction. With industrialized construction, we're leveraging that repeatability across multiple projects.

We're saying, I make this particular component for multiple building projects that I contribute to. So I have that opportunity to get better, to scale, to get better materials, deals. All kinds of things happen when we enable and embrace that repeatability.

I would close this slide here by saying the first principles of industrialized construction is embracing repeatability. We have to figure out how to do more of the same things over and over again and get better at them over time.

If we only ever do one of something, we have no opportunity to get better at it. So how do we make that possible for our customers? I think that's part of what we're really going to talk about today.

Some basic information about the opportunity. Industrialized construction will have a big impact, as we just mentioned. But the construction industry is $13 trillion and is projected to get to, I think, $15 trillion by the end of the decade. It's projected to grow by 2.7% annually after that. And so significant growth in the overall industry.

And prefabrication is expected to grow at 5.6%. So it's actually significantly faster, in fact, probably double what the overall growth rate is. And when we look at how much output there is in prefabrication today, people that are performing the first step of industrialized construction is about $407 billion worth of things that are delivered using prefabrication methods. So it's a pretty significant opportunity for us.

And we are characterizing industrialized construction by the different kinds of-- characterize the different kinds of things that can be made and delivered in the service of industrialized construction.

We are simplifying it to three key areas. One is single-trade assemblies. These would be single delivered components like a balcony or an awning or stairs, things like that. Then you also have multitrade assemblies, things where MEP is integrated into wall panels, exterior wall panels, things like that. Volumetric modular is the third one.

And we commissioned some research several years back and showed the size of those particular industries and how much production is delivered along those. So significant opportunities there as well.

And the third thing that we would say is an indicator of the opportunity is that there is a growing body of research and projects that are encouraging our customers and our partners to embrace industrialized construction.

It's no longer in the backwoods. It's front and center where people are trying to advocate for this as a process. Governments are trying to create incentives to encourage people to actually adopt it. And so you can find this stuff pretty readily out there.

There is no clear global, widely accepted definition of industrialized construction or modern means of construction, depending on which geo you're from. And so it's important for us to define what industrialized construction is so that we can set it as a context for our further sets of our conversations.

We've distilled it into three key areas. And the first is prefabrication. We do prefabrication today in traditional AEC workflows. And we do get some benefits from working in this particular methodology. But as I mentioned, because you can only apply it in scope to a single project, its returns are necessarily limited.

And also it's a lagging decision. So you don't decide what you can prefabricate until you've reached a certain decision point in the overall project and said, hey, we want to assess this project for things that we can prefabricate.

It isn't going into the project and saying, hey, let's use prefabrication. It's figuring out later in the process. So this is a really important part of industrialized construction because it is about the physical delivery of the components for the building.

The second component is productization. So if we're going to make things and prefabricate them but we want to reuse them across multiple projects, can we define them in a way that is more regular, that is more standard but allow some variability? Like, not all the stairs are the same, but they follow a same pattern. Not all the balconies are the same, but they follow a same pattern.

Can we provide a way to express these products in a way that we can share them earlier in the process? And this allows us to move to the beginning of the process. This allows us to move to become a leading decision for the overall process.

The third component is DfMA. So we want to use products earlier in the design life cycle. We want to encourage people to design with products, to customize products, put them in their building project, and then to extract the design intent or the information required for those products and deliver it back to the prefabricator.

And so that's how we're choosing to design DfMA. You can perform these things independently with limited effect. When you work with them together, you have the most opportunity to be impactful for your projects.

And shown a little bit differently. My background is a manufacturing background, so we're used to lean principles and closed-loop systems. And so if we think about prefabrication, productization, and DfMA, we can connect these in a way that create a closed-loop process. And really it's an opportunity to work in a new way across multiple building projects to deliver some of this overall benefit.

And we think this dramatically improves our customers' outcomes. With traditional AEC workflows, we don't have enough information about the design and how we're going to fabricate it and deliver it until much later in the overall process.

And the opportunity is if you are designing with products that only yield known manufacturable and accurate results, the first thing you place in your building project winds up being more accurate. You wind up increasing your certainty.

Everything around that winds up being more certain, too, because there are fewer things that can go wrong. And so the more products that get put into an overall building project, the more accurate your project becomes and the better results that you wind up getting.

So we talk about the traditional AEC workflow at Autodesk. And we've asserted this for a very, very long time. It's plan, design, build, and operate. And that works for a specific building project, for a single project. It's a very project-centric point of view. But if you want to get the scale, how are we going to do this across many different building projects?

And this is where the IC capabilities complement the traditional AEC workflows. This is an opportunity to take things and use them across multiple projects. I will say that every project will have a combination of both traditional AEC workflows.

And I see workflows as well. The sites are all unique, so you're going to do something unique with the site prep and the foundation every single time. But once you're on top of that and you are looking at the repeatability of the rest of the building, then you begin to have the opportunities to leverage some of the IC workflows.

And like we talked about before, we can do prefabrication today. But it typically lags this design decision. And so the opportunity is limited to downstream from that particular point, whereas IC allows us to move to the beginning of the process.

And this is a concept that we're calling the left shift. We want to help our customers left shift. We want to help them enable fabrication-aware design decisions. So if I'm designing, I want to make sure that anything that I put into my building design or as many things as possible are both accurate and know manufacturable. And when I do that, I wind up getting better results.

This is a particularly useful framework for us for talking about it. So we're going to go back to it several different times here. So what I'd like to show is that when we're using the prefab or productization DfMA and prefabrication, there are some specific activities that we perform within each one of these.

And because we're trying to bring manufacturing capabilities to AEC, there's another representation here where you see that we're using tools from both the manufacturing environment and tools for the AEC environment.

Another way of describing that is we have tools that allow us to define and manufacture products that go into buildings. And we have tools that allow us to manage a building and the products that go into that project. So there's a swimlane for AEC and project-centric tools. And there's a swimlane for manufacturing. And those are product-centric tools.

The general workflow then is that we define a product with a manufacturing tool, a mechanical CAD tool like Inventor or Fusion. And we want to publish that so that these products are discoverable during the planning and design phase. I want to select my suppliers. I want to select my products. I want to design with them and put unique instances of my products into my building project.

When my building is mature enough, I want to be able to extract those products from the building project so then I can automatically create the fabrication information to be able to make those things. And we're going back into the manufacturing tools when we do that.

And as we talked about it being a continuous improvement process, because we have put products into a project, we have data about those projects and how they were installed, where there are defects, other issues.

And we can capture that information and feed it back to the suppliers of those products to make them better over time and ultimately make the project execution and delivery better over time, too, because we're learning across that dimension as well.

And to make this a little bit more direct, these are the capabilities that we have in our ecosystem today that we're trying to bring to bear for industrialized construction. We have the product design and manufacturing collection that has both Vault-- or sorry, it has both Inventor and Fusion in it. But it also has Vault that allows you to do traditional product data management, which is something commonly used in traditional manufacturing and product engineering.

And we're going to publish the products from the Inventor tools or from the PBMC into a publicly discoverable location. Today, we're using Autodesk Docs for that. And we think that there's opportunities to use capabilities like Content Cloud and BuildingConnected to make them more publicly discoverable. So as a supplier, I want to put my product someplace where people can discover them, consume them in their overall project.

And we're using the AEC collection primarily for design. So Revit is the number one tool. But there's opportunities with other capabilities that are in there to design with the products. And as we move back, extracting products out of the building project, we can pull them out. And then we can begin to use tools like Product Lifecycle Management, Fusion Operations for manufacturing execution systems or production management. There are other sets of capabilities that are in our ecosystem that create value for our customers today.

The challenge, though, is when we're talking to our customers about building products, we show up like this. We say, hey, here's our AEC tools, here's Revit, and here's AutoCAD, and here's the fabrication suite. And we tell them, this is the tools that you need to execute your work.

And we're missing an opportunity to talk to them about the manufacturing tools that are available, the tools that allow them to productize what they know how to make, the mechanical engineering tools, the product life cycle management tools, the product data management tools, the manufacturing execution tools. So we have a rich suite of tools that help traditional manufacturers get value today. And they're proven over many, many years.

We just need to figure out how to help our AEC customers leverage these tools to better effect and get better results. And we also have the platform that we are leveraging to connect these capabilities together.

This is an area that we are expanding and growing. We talk about our industry clouds, the AEC cloud, and the manufacturing cloud. And our platform is the vehicle to allow us to move back and forth between these two clouds and share manufacturing information with the AEC information.

So that's kind of a setup on our perspective on what industrialized construction is, what is the pattern that we're encouraging our customers to explore and adopt, and how you get benefit out of using manufacturing-- or using industrialized construction.

I want to shift gears a little bit into Informed Design, which is a capability that our team has delivered that we believe follows that pattern. And so these particular capabilities help our customers design buildings with certainty, to deliver faster, improve quality, and reduce waste.

And so jumping right into this. We're back to the same pattern that we have here. But we're overlaying on this-- the specific tools that we have in our solution to deliver these capabilities to our customers.

These capabilities are commercially available today, so you can explore them as you wish. I think the Expo Hall is closed, so no more demos today. But if you're interested in it, we can figure out how to get you more information on this.

The way that our solution works today is that a product engineer using Inventor mechanical engineering tool can define a product with rules, allowable variation, validation rules that control the extents with which that item can be customized.

And that product is published to an area that makes it publicly discoverable. We're using Autodesk Docs to do that today. So you navigate to a tenant, a project, and a folder to publish your product to that location so that it's discoverable within the building project.

And the next portion is that an architect or a designer using Revit can navigate to that same product but from within Revit, select that product, interact with that product, customize that product. And we will generate a unique instance of that product and drop it into their building project. And you can repeat that for all the different products that you want to Insert into your building project.

And then once your building is complete or complete enough and you need to get those products out, we have a browser-based solution that allows you to open the project, select all of the products that are in it because we can identify them. They have metadata in them that tags them as such. And we can say create bills of materials, shop drawings, CAD neutral formats, and other outputs and write them to the location that you specify.

And so this is the general workflow that we're making happen with inform design. And as always, with any given project, we have the opportunity to gather information about how effective that was and provide the opportunity to optimize the product further over time.

So we're going to show some demo videos here real quick. But there's three phases in our solution. We call it a solution, not really a product, because it's connecting three different people using three different tools to create customer value.

We talked about the production engineer using Inventor to define a product. And that's published to the platform. And then we talked about an architect or a designer using Revit to design with those products. And the last component being a browser-based application for extracting the products from a building project.

So I broken this into three short videos showing each one of the phases that we just described. And then I'm going to show you another video with a much more detailed product at the end. So we wanted to start this with a relatively simple product. So we can talk about the features and what the person is interacting with rather than focusing on the specific product.

So with this video here, this is a wall panel with an opening in it. And this is a configurable product. So we're leveraging iLogic to make it configurable. But we've added some capabilities to improve inventors' ability to export Revit content.

So you can attach significant additional BIM data to this coordinate systems, family names, categories, a handful of other things so that when you create a Revit family from this, it's not something you need to author over again once you drop it into the Revit environment.

So we're attaching several different BIM attributes to this particular model as a source of truth. And then we begin the publishing process. And it starts by selecting which of the parameters you want to expose as controls and then defining constraints for them. What are the bounds for each one of those controls over time? And you can, in fact, write very sophisticated rules. They can have dependencies between them. They can have all kinds of logic.

And then we specify what outputs do you want to be able to derive from this particular product? Bills of materials, lower level of detail, Revit families, shop drawings, other information. And then we specify where we want to write this product to.

So it's a relatively simple process. If you know how to model an Inventor, you will have no difficulty using these particular capabilities. We find that not many people in the AEC world use Inventor, so that tends to be our barrier to entry. But that's part of the good practice of learning how to productize. So that's what productization entails.

The second phase of our solution is the architect using Revit. And so similarly, I want to design with that particular wall panel. I will open or add inside of Revit. I will navigate to the catalog where the content is. I will select the wall panel. And you can see the thumbnail for the wall panel show up so you know what you're working with.

And if someone has created a previous version of it, it's already there, it's been precomputed, you could drop that in your project right now immediately. But if it doesn't meet your needs, you can customize it. And so there's a form there on the left-hand side of that screen. It was the same form that was authored in the Inventor model.

And I can interact with it and customize it and make it fit for purpose. Once I do that, I'm going to take the inputs and the template and compute a Revit family on demand for that unique instance from the source of truth. So you wind up with some customizability. But you know that we'll always be bounded by what's manufacturable for this particular supplier.

And here we're showing that we inserted a Revit family generated for that unique instance, and then showing the additional BIM data that we associated with it before, which is an important part of the overall process.

And the third portion here is now that I've put wall panels into my building, how do I get them out of the building so that I can manufacture them? So in our video here, we have a browser based application. You simply share the project. And via the tree or the Canvas, you can select all the instances of the wall panels. And you can see the recipe and the template name for each one of them.

When I generate outputs, I press the Generate Outputs button. And I select from the available outputs that can be created and the location I want to write them to. And it will package that all up, send it to the cloud, compute each one of those results, and write them back out to the location that you specified.

So here we're going to show-- I think we start with a shop drawing. For this particular instance, we will show a bill of materials for this particular instance, and then a step file that was generated unique to that particular instance. So simple model. But these three videos show you how you publish a product, how you design with the product, and how you extract the product information for fabrication.

So now I want to show it over again, except that this is a much more detailed and realistic-- actually not even realistic-- a real product. This is a configurable wall panel from a company called Lada Cube. They were here at the Expo Hall in the coat booth. And so this is one of the things that they make as a regular product for configuring stores like-- help me, Andy.

ANDY: Something like big blocks construction like a commentary fit-out.

RYAN MCMAHON: Yes. OK. Retail space fit-out. Sorry, man. End of the day on Thursday. [LAUGHS] All right. Very good. So this is what they have designed this particular product for.

And so in this video here, you can zoom in and see this is a bunch of very complex folded sheet metal. We have rivets. We have holes. We have slots. And then as we're interacting with this, you can see how flexible this particular product is and many of the options that are available.

So we want to take this and publish it so that it is available for fitting out of one of these retail spaces. I'm going to pick a few controls. I'm going to put some rules in there. And then I'm going to specify what can be created from that and publish that to Docs.

Now, if I'm working on a new project and I want to use one of these walls, I simply select the wall. I configure it so that it's fit for purpose. And I will generate an instance of this wall panel and drop it into my Revit project here. So that's just placing one. And then we will show the BIM data that was associated with it.

But what gets really interesting is when you do this for all the wall panels for this single floor of a 13-floor building, there wind up being 527 a month on this one floor. And we can automatically create all the fabrication detail for every one of them.

So you select them all, press Generate Outputs. What kind of outputs do you want? Where do you want to write them? And we will create a bill of materials for each one. We'll create shop drawings for each one. And then we can create a detailed CAD-neutral format as another example.

So here's a step file. And when you zoom into this step file, you can see that we've preserved all the fabrication level of detail. That's because it was derived from a template that was authored in Inventor. So we haven't lost any of the fidelity or the information required to be able to fabricate this thing. Yet we didn't bog down our building project with too much detail for this particular assembly.

So in this way, we think that we are fulfilling that workflow of-- we're designing a product with a manufacturing tool, designing with that product in the AEC tools, and then extracting that information for fabrication with the fabrication tools.

And what we're hoping to do bigger picture is allow an ecosystem of suppliers to publish their products so that other people can discover them. So imagine a supplier of windows, doors, wall panels, bathroom pods, hospital head walls, you name it, publishing to a common catalog or a publicly discoverable location so that other personas can say, hey, I'm using these particular components in my project. I have a bunch of windows. Let me customize my windows, insert them into the project. Let me do the same for doors, wall panels, and so forth.

And now my building design happens with many, many known manufacturable and accurate products with which we can automate the detailing process. We can save a whole ton of time. I think that my recollection is those 527 wall panels and generating three items for each one of them was about 10 minutes.

If you had to do that manually, that could be weeks of work for somebody to do manually. So not only do you get it faster, but you don't have the cost of the labor associated with it. You don't have the errors associated with it as well. So very powerful pattern to work from. And then we think that having this ecosystem play here, it's an opportunity to allow more and more people to participate and work in this particular way.

So we think that Informed Design delivers-- increases the certainty that our customers can design with. You can design with products to increase project certainty. It allows you to manufacture products, to optimize your processes, and reduce waste. It allows you to manufacture at scale because I'm making a lot of similar things with a predictable pattern. And when I'm doing that, I have the opportunity to adopt many manufacturing principles to get much, much more effective there.

And lastly, we're connecting these AEC and manufacturing workflows to accelerate processes. I just mentioned the automated detailing part of that. When you can accelerate that dramatically, you have many, many more options. I could cycle through that computation many, many more times. And it reduces errors because it's fully automated.

So we think that Informed Design is a pretty compelling way. It's an initial pilot hole to show how the industrialized construction pattern can work, that we think that our customers can use it to prove the value of industrialized construction.

OK, so the next section is really, how are we going to transform the industry much, much more broadly? So we showed where we're getting started. But this needs to be significantly bigger. We can't make incremental changes and expect big changes in the industry. What else can we do to really drive this home and be impactful for our customers?

And we start by saying productization is happening. Many people tell me, yeah, but it's been happening for 20 years. Industrialized construction has been happening for 50 years. What's different now?

I think that all of the pressures in the industry are forcing people to rethink the use of traditional AEC workflows. It's not working. And they're willing to try stuff. They need to be told what to try because they don't know what to try yet.

So as we are coming up with more novel approaches, people are much more willing to say, hey, let me see what happens. I have little to lose if I try it. If it gets better, it gets better. If it doesn't, I'll try something else later. But I can't keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

So we would articulate-- we would say that we think that it's happening right now. We're at the very beginning of that curve where we expect to see pretty significant changes over the next two or three years.

And part of why it's happening is that when you begin to work in these particular ways, we believe that we deliver significant benefits to each one of the stakeholders across the value chain. The one that we hear the most feedback about is the architect. Everyone says, oh, architects won't adopt this because they want ultimate creative freedom.

And the reality is when we're talking to architects, they wind up saying, yeah, I like creative freedom. But what I need is some flexibility. But I want to know that it's accurate. I want to know that it's manufacturable.

And if you can deliver those three things, I can work with that because that allows me to go faster for many elements of my building. And it allows me to spend more time on the reasons that I became an architect. I get to spend more time in design, making it a functional building, making it aesthetically pleasing, rather than designing stairs. Nobody becomes an architect to design stairs.

And similarly, across the value chain, each one of these stakeholders has pretty significant benefits. And so each one of them, when they're doing their particular part, get benefits. And that makes them more receptive to using these methods.

And then when they participate in an ecosystem, it's like, oh, wait a minute. Now when I'm connected to these other stakeholders, I get even more value. And so we think that gets the flywheel rolling for our customers.

And one thing that we would put out there-- this is a little bit more abstract-- is that there's a value network in our industry. And we attempted to capture a value network for all the key stakeholders in the AEC industry, how they work together, what are their relationships like, sources and uses of power here. And this is a way to articulate how people interact with their stakeholders in a particular project.

The thing about a value network describing how this industry and these business models all work is that they're not static. And so when something shows up and disrupts the way the AEC industry works, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to be ready to make sure that you are taking advantage of those changes to your positive benefit rather than reacting to them and maybe somebody else competing around you?

And so we put it to you all to go think about, what is the value network as you perceive it? And what are you doing to future-proof your business? And think about, what can we be doing so that we are not caught flat-footed?

What we think we can do about this, I'll articulate on this slide. In the Informed Design section of this presentation, I articulate what our capabilities do today. We are proving the pattern. We are proving that when you work in this particular way, that we can deliver real value to our customers.

And that just gets us started. At some point, we have to figure out how to scale. And we think there's an opportunity by publishing products to publicly discoverable location that we can get that flywheel going.

So what if we use Content Catalog? What if we use BuildingConnected? What if the 1.5 million suppliers in BuildingConnected started productizing and there were more products to discover? These are the kinds of activities that might get us started on that particular direction.

And once you have some critical mass around people designing with products, you can make them even more valuable. You could build more services on top of these capabilities. So if I can create a bill of materials in an automated way, that means I know-- I should be able to compute the cost pretty easily. I should be able to compute the carbon pretty easily. There's many other services that we could build on top of that. It's just the beginning.

And with a proliferation of products that are out there, we can use AI-based tools to do design assist, to help you identify products that better solve your needs, to auctioneer, to combine products in unique ways to make recommendations.

All of that becomes possible because there's enough products out there that people understand how they work and they understand how they can design with them. That becomes a much, much more interesting prospect.

And once you're doing all of those kinds of things, imagine using generative methods and saying, hey, I want to use generative and have assigned products to a space and let generative explore them. Let generative take the products and map them to all of the different spaces that exist in amassing. And by the way, solve for cost and solve for carbon and iterate through that and get me better results.

That becomes possible because you have an ecosystem of products that only generate accurate and known manufacturable results. That's a really compelling way to use generative in the AEC ecosystem here.

And the end state here-- I don't know if this is 5 years out or 10 years out or maybe even further here-- is when you are changing the way that people work and delivering real value in these ways, it gives you the opportunity to say, hey, our assumptions about how the industry work were maybe not true. And we have an opportunity to look at how we can work in different ways.

We have the opportunity to reassess the business models and say, hey, could we deliver in more efficient ways? The construction industry, the AEC industry is the last major industry that doesn't have online marketplaces like many other industries have.

Sooner or later, there's going to be enough pressure for something like that to exist. And we think that the capabilities that we've identified lay the groundwork to make some of those kinds of things possible.

And so wrapping up here, so what actions can you take to adopt industrialized construction? I would say this is a complex topic that's hard to cover in 40 seconds or whatever it is. But it really depends on your familiarity with manufacturing methodology, with where you are in the maturity matrix here.

But one thing that you can do simply is to look at where are the opportunities to adopt repeatability in my processes even? What things can I get better at just at the process level? And then what are the things that I make repeatedly across many different projects? Can you identify some areas that you might want to apply productization? And begin to experiment with that.

And then the next thing beyond that, if you're already doing those things, look at the opportunities for how do you systemize a system of products or adjacent products? Those are all areas that are rich for opportunity but things that are clearly actionable that you could go back to your job and say, hey, what are some things that I could explore to determine whether or not I can get value out of these methods?

All right. So I want to close with two thoughts here. The first thought is that Autodesk is a unique company in that we have both AEC capabilities. And we have manufacturing capabilities there. I can't think of another major competitor in the world that has this breadth and depth of capabilities that we have.

And that makes it interesting for us to deliver solutions that are novel and new that can allow our customers to work in entirely new ways. And I hope that what I've shown you today is an idea of one of the ways that we are working to make that happen.

But we think that there's many, many more things that are possible. When you consider all of the discussion around AI and platform and industry clouds, what we've shown here is just toe in the water activity. What else will we be able to make happen when those things get more mature over time?

And the second thought is we think that a capability Informed Design has enough capabilities to demonstrate that this new pattern of working that we're asserting delivers real value. And we can test it and prove it with our customers to say, hey, yes, these are the kinds of results that we're getting.

And we're actively looking for people to engage with to work on this. But we think what we have is a great place to start on this journey. And we're looking forward to where we're going to go in the future. So with that, thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

MODERATOR: Hello. So we encourage people to ask questions. We have one question online. And then if anyone has questions, just walk up to the mic and speak.

RYAN MCMAHON: You have to walk to the back of the room to the mic.

MODERATOR: Or if you have a loud enough voice, you can shout. Just want to make sure everyone hears it. But we can take the online question first? OK. So we have Ryan McVeigh, who asks, what prerequisite software is required to implement Informed Design, or is this a new collection?

RYAN MCMAHON: So Informed Design is an entitlement of either the PDMC, the Product Design and Manufacturing Collection, or the AEC collection. So if you are using either of those today, you have access to the add-ins that are required for the Inventor component and the Revit component.

The prerequisites for using Informed Design because we publish products to ACC Docs, you need to have an active subscription for that. And at some point in the future, this will be a consumption-based business model that we will charge tokens for creating outputs down the road. So you need to have some nonzero token balance. But we are currently not charging for any compute using Informed Design today.

Other questions? How quickly can I get to the bar? No. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Good day. Just with the roadmap side of things--

RYAN MCMAHON: Can you put the mic closer?

AUDIENCE: Just with the roadmap side of things, so I understand that it's an in place model at the moment. I'm just thinking about-- because I've gone to a few of these talks at the moment. And I'm just thinking about how I can actually get it using or working on a MAC contractor and how I can get it actually working with our subcontractor network.

So at the moment it's an in-place model component in Revit. Is there any future to-- I don't know-- move into more of like a system design process? Because I with those wall panels, that was done through Cope. So are you partnering more with Cope to get those wall panels and floor panels and--

RYAN MCMAHON: So Cope is one of our partners. And one of the ways that Cope complements Informed Design is they allowed us to work with systems of components. And I think I mentioned how to make IC actionable section, that system of components is an obvious step going forward. That was something that if we didn't partner with them, we'd have to figure out how to do that ourselves. So they help us accelerate the delivery of that.

But in general, what we are looking at doing is, how do we create-- how do we allow you to productize a single component and then get to more and more complex components over time? They're doing systems of similar things. At some point, you have some disparate things that have to integrate with one another. And that complexity it's challenging. We're figuring out what that particularly means.

And our current working point of view is that if things need to integrate deeply and they're provided by two suppliers, we would hope that we would encourage them to work together and do the productization in a way that they define that integration point between them so that when they're put in there that those pieces work better together. Did that answer your question kind of?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

RYAN MCMAHON: OK. Very good. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: So I have a question regarding is there any way to reduce the level of detail that we'll be sharing to Revit family? So we have a customer who is using iLogic and Inventor. But whenever they share a Revit family to the architecture, they don't share all the details, including fasteners and everything, all the holes and everything. So is there any way that we control what to share when it is to the architecture?