Optimizing Your Business Around Industrialized Construction

AMY MARKS: Hello, and welcome to Autodesk University. We are so excited to have you here today to talk about optimizing your business around industrialized construction. I am joined by some of my amazing colleagues that I will introduce you to shortly. And thank you so much for joining us here today.

A little bit about me, I'm the vise president of industrialized construction strategy and evangelism. Most of you know me as the queen of prefab. And we're going to talk about some amazing ways that Autodesk can help you on your journey for industrialized construction today.

So what is industrialized construction? Many of you have seen us talk about the house that industrialized construction built. It's not just about the physical pieces and parts, but also about foundational enablers, like technology and process, things like the internet of things, big data and analytics.

As we think about buildings in the future that are going to be autonomous, and sensors that make digital twin a reality, and also the way in which we're able to access information on the cloud, which we definitely know from the last couple of years here during the pandemic how important those things are.

Those are very important to the industrialized construction strategy as we think about buildings as broken down components, instead of just one offs every time, that we want to get information from. Also, we have our process enablers like lean manufacturing and building information modeling. We want to inform that I with more intelligence, and build upon the amazing data that we already have in the Revit environment today.

Many of you have seen me talk about DfMA And in the past, I would say Design For Manufacturing and Assembly. But we've evolved that thinking to start saying Data For Manufacturing and Assembly to make sure that our designs are informed with data for the manufacturing process, as well as other data, like sustainability information, and anything you might want to provide insights about how things are made to inform your design.

Then on the upper left, you'll see the prefabrication continuum, things like advanced building products that come right from manufacturers that reduce drying time, curing time, hot work, anything that makes things easier on the job site you can buy from manufacturers, single trade assemblies, multi-trade assemblies that have-- the name describes multi-trades within that component, and then volumetric modular.

Which is, there's no hierarchy. It's really more like a kit of parts. And those parts, we're going to talk about how they evolve from prefabricated pieces and parts to prioritization, where eventually the word will be saying is manufactured product. And so that's the physicality of this.

And we want that data that informs design to include advanced building methodologies like robotics and automation, as well as additive manufacturing. Because we don't just want to make things by hand. We want to automate them and use the latest and greatest technology, and machinery, and tooling, to create these buildings in the built environment.

So why is this happening right now? Why are we here talking about industrialized construction? Well, technology has changed. This is no longer just my phone. It's converged. It's now my phone, it's my babysitter, it's my entertainment, it's my matchmaker maybe, it's my map so I know where I'm going in life.

Process has actually converged. And we're seeing design, make, and operate. Those processes not just need to be connected, but they really need to inform one another. So industries have really converged. And that's why we're seeing industrialized construction come to the forefront of many of our customers conversations.

Because ultimately their business models have already changed. We know that, we hear you. We know you're not just working within the silo of just design, or just construction, or just as an owner, or just a manufacturer, but we know that this is converging across the silos, and those walls are breaking down. So that we have to understand how to enable better things for you and your new business model.

I'll tell you that we talk a lot about change here in my group at industrialized construction, and also throughout Autodesk. And I'll tell you that you need to understand that change happens first when you're dissatisfied with how the way things are now.

Hopefully at Autodesk University, I know we are showing you a vision for what's possible. And we want to give you some first concrete steps of action, because you'll need all that to overcome resistance, as Dan Miller taught us. And so you'll hear us talk a little bit about transforming your companies, and we work within this framework of transformation.

And if you follow the Watch Now portion of Autodesk University, you'll see me go through this again as I talk about from prefabrication to prioritization that we don't just need outcomes for what we want to achieve, but we need a strategy on how to get there. And there are foundational things that are so important that if you skip over, you won't be able to achieve that.

And then prioritization, as that Watch Now presentation will show you, all the way up from digitization, connection, optimization, and ultimately circularity, because digital waste ultimately leads to physical waste. So we want to think about how we can reuse everything, not just for environmental, but for our process, for our industry and our ecosystem of industries, to make sure we can be the best we can be.

So how can Autodesk help you as a partner on this journey? We know that this is a partnership that makes this most valuable. So let me introduce some of the most amazing people. If you want to read their bios in totality in the handout for this session, I won't go too into it, because I think you'll be able to read it for yourself.

But we're going to be talking with Ryan McMahon, Director of Product for Industrialized Construction, somebody I'm lucky enough to work with every day on these types of things. And we'll also work with Allison Scott, one of the amazing thought leaders and also Director of Construction Thought Leadership and Customer Marketing here at Autodesk.

Tiffany Bachmeier, I am lucky as well to work with all of these people. She and I work very closely as the Director of Global M&E and Advanced Manufacturing. She'll talk to you about our convergence consulting team and how they can support you.

And last and certainly not least, when we want to talk about the future and what is possible, there's no one better than Mike Haley, our Vice President of Research. So with that, I'm going to hand this off so that these wonderful people can tell you how we can help you through your industrialized construction journey in these areas. First, I'll hand it off to Ryan McMahon.

RYAN MCMAHON: Thank you, Amy, great introduction. I'm excited to talk about this. Can we move to the next slide, please? So I want to touch in a little bit more detail in some of the concepts that Amy mentioned in the introduction there. When we talk about data for manufacturing and assembly, we really need to help our customers develop the data that represents what they make, and how it can be modified, and how it's produced.

It's much more than just what the physical representation is in the design, and how it's consumed and designed. This data defines what the construction product is, that the trades produce in support of many different projects. Not just bespoke things that are prefabricated and included in one building, but how do they support many of the similar things that are provided to many different building projects they work with?

And it's also used to inform building design. This is why DfMA is often misunderstood. So with that, productization is really more than what you make and ship. It's about how you operate your business, how you scale it across many customers and many projects, and how do you implement and optimize your processes to support them all?

By defining construction products, companies can borrow means and methods for manufacturing to optimize their processes, material use, and quality, and be more responsible or-- responsible-- more responsive and deliver faster to their customers. These dynamic construction products really can then be shared with architects to inform their design choices at the beginning of the process, so that they know these things can actually be made.

AMY MARKS: Sorry.

RYAN MCMAHON: [LAUGHS] No worries. So when you use these during the design process, prioritization improves, accelerates many of the processes, and improves certainty of their delivery. The designer knows during the design process that what they're specifying and customizing is actually feasible and manufacturable. That's really the key benefit of this dynamic content.

And lastly, it frees them up to spend more time working on the activities that really do require design and custom work, like the functionality or the aesthetics of a particular building. And then the last slide here, Autodesk delivers robust manufacturing capabilities that our construction customers should adopt to get started with productization and manufacturing methods.

And we're building the capabilities that help connect fabrication with design to deliver this informed design processes. And we will digitally connect design, make and assemble, and operate processes to streamline your workflows. So with that, I will hand it off.

AMY MARKS: Alison Scott, help us connecting design, construction, and design making, please.

ALLISON SCOTT: Thank you so much, Amy. And thanks Ryan for setting us up there on understanding what is informed design. So in our world we talk a lot about what is connected construction. And, now, the power of connected construction, does it live within this conceptual box of construction administration, or construction management, as a phase alone?

It's real power is when we amplify and leverage the data, the geometry that's coming from that informed design process that's coming from planning, that's coming from the productization process as Ryan was describing. And we're putting it to work in the construction phase so that we're getting better outcomes.

And we're also looking for more predictability throughout that lifecycle. So making a building is kind of like the ultimate group project. I mean, everyone has to bring their best attitude to the table, their best skills to the table. Folks are assigned different parts of the project.

But if certain team members are working off of an outline that's two weeks old, or they didn't get to weigh in on something that was part of a project that impacts their piece of the pie, then soon enough all of those pieces are not going to work together. This is the reality that we deal with right now, day-to-day, in the design and making, in the design and construction process.

So what connected construction is really doing is helping to reduce these miscommunications. It's connecting the dots in a more seamless way so that we can create an even playing field for people to have access to what they need, when they need it, and have their work informed by earlier steps in the process.

So, ultimately, if you can go to the next slide there Amy-- connected construction is truly about minimizing the risks and using automation on how information is shared and so that we can eliminate the duplication of tasks. That's a lot of what Ryan was just talking about is how are we beginning to streamline this data, pull together and productize it, and create more predictability.

This process is also powered by an integrated and connected platform. And this is really important. We want that information to be shared. We want it to be connected. We want it to be updated once, instead of toggling between systems. Instead of having the human error of data missing, we want to minimize that data loss. And we want to save time and resources in the process.

So by connecting tools and data, we can also share across teams. We create this centralized hub with project information, increasing the quality and the efficiency of the project ahead. So we do begin to see these kinds of outcomes that Hung is starting to talk about here on this slide, where we're getting to not just inform design, but then informed decisions.

If we can get to the next slide, Amy. So one of the things that's really interesting about all of this for me is that the way that raw data, and even things like design intent, are getting transformed into information in the construction process. So traditionally, what does it really look like?

We see a lot of manual processes, of course the human brain power, and our experiences. So we've got a lot of spreadsheets. We've got a lot of phone calls, meetings, back of a napkin sketching. This is all institutional knowledge, and it's all very applicable. But so many of our processes in construction are relying on these embedded and the lived experiences of our seasoned professionals.

And, frankly, while it's very valuable, it's very hard to capture for it to be used over and over again. That's where we see challenges and inefficiencies beginning to happen. So the power that technology and productized approaches in a connected platform really begin to apply for us, is that we're seeing this information begin to unlock our ability to harness the project data.

We begin to organize it, interpret it, uncover patterns faster, and be able to put it to work in a more actionable way so that the human workforce that it takes to actually make this data put to work is much more immediately accessible. That is our goal, make the data actionable. Next slide, Amy.

We also know that design-- when design is informed, there are big, big benefits that start to happen in construction. In fact, we're doing some research around this right now. So we have found with our own construction intelligence research team that projects which have had profit margin erosion in their project, they tend to have around 50% more RFIs with a root cause in the coordination phase.

And when does coordination phase happen? It tends to happen at that intersection between design and construction. So when we dig further into data like this, we also found that roughly 70% of RFIs are specifically stemming from design, and documentations, errors, and omissions.

So one of the strategies that we can employ knowing this for our industry is that when you have a true and more robust design review process, up front you're going to see downstream impact, which really just means we need to get the designers, the engineers, the fabricators, the manufacturers, the contractors in the room earlier to see problems before they start. And that's also where innovation begins to happen.

If you can go into the next slide, Amy. So when we put this into context of things like productization and industrialized construction, the upsides are massive. So if we've created an informed design, we have informed construction, and we're connecting on a technology platform that is open, and integrated, and sharing the data back and forth in a bi-directional way, then we're truly poised to improve quality, cost, schedule, safety, as well as potentially profit margin.

Plus we're then also capturing those lessons learned, and applying them to the next project, which is what you were talking about, Amy, this idea of circularity and really optimizing that knowledge that's been used throughout the project lifecycle. Last slide, Amy, for me.

So moving towards this process of working does not happen overnight. Driving towards a more resilient and future-proof business takes a lot of time, it takes people, it takes resources, and it takes a lot of energy to adapt. What we know for resiliency that you need three things. You need a willingness to transform, you need a culture that enables change, and you need a technology strategy to help you get there.

And the backbone of all of this is digital transformation. Which does look different for everybody, but the good news is that we are helping, actively helping customers right now take steps toward digital transformation. So I'm going to help kick it off here and share it all over to Tiffany, who's going to talk a little bit more about how we help you unlock those next.

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Thank you so much, Allison. And before I do that, I just wanted to remind everybody if you have questions, comments, thoughts, please reach out to us in the platform with the Q&A panel. We are happy to answer all of your questions, have an open discussion and dialogue with you all at the end of this. There will be plenty of time for that, so just a reminder of that.

So how do we help customers actually achieve this through our consulting organization? So I lead-- I lead a team within our consulting organization that is doing this very actively with Amy, and all of the rest of the amazing experts on this team that are talking to you today.

And we really we see this as an opportunity to come alongside our customers truly as trusted advisors to deliver that same transformation framework that you saw Amy show earlier in the slides, that really take us through all those steps of where we need to get to from foundational all the way up to that circularity. Go ahead, next slide, Amy.

So our mission as we do this is really to partner with those customers desiring convergence, the convergence customers that we have, applying the manufacturing best practices to connect our manufacturing informed design, optimizing manufacturing, accelerating construction and assembly through productization, digitization, data reuse, and platform optimization to provide better business outcomes, operations, and sustainable practices.

It's a mouthful, but that's truly what we're doing within consulting, and alongside product, and with what you'll see with Mike with research later. We want to be that bridge in between those areas to really help bring that realization to our customers. Go ahead, next slide, Amy.

And some of the ways that we do that is what you're seeing on screen right now. These are just different ways that we can come alongside through workshops, and bringing that foundational methodology along with the advanced technology that we have, being able to fill gaps as we work through those, and we work with product, and we look towards those digitization practices, and then even through how do we optimize and ultimately automate workflows for our customers. Go ahead, next slide.

And this-- well, provocative in slide, just as an example of some of the practices that we're bringing to the thought processes and the thought leadership that we have within our manufacturing team to also bring alongside our construction customers and some of the things.

While I know it's not an exact parity here, this is a very high-profile manufacturing example from our aerospace industry representing a great example of what the future state is that we really want to help the construction industry achieve through these best practices that have been developed in manufacturing over decades.

This is a very large structure, totally fabricated in separate modules all around the world, and assembled in a factory environment, very similar to a construction site. And you can see all the reasons why this happens in that blue box.

But that's really the same ideas and methodology that we're applying, just in a different way, within the construction industry. Now, we love being that bridge to help for the today. But what if it's not fully achievable today? And with that, I'd like to send it over to Mike.

MIKE HALEY: Thanks, Tiffany. I'm glad you asked that question. So we're going to explore three examples of how our research team is collaborating with customers to explore all these futures of industrialized construction. You can go to the next slide, Amy. Our first one is a moonshot, where we're exploring how we can produce mass housing that is both affordable and sustainable using these industrialized construction methods-- next slide.

This project is being done in collaboration with our partners at Factory OS. Factory OS builds prefabricated housing modules, and manages the entire design to build process. We're focusing our efforts on the sustainability and impact of their products, while also achieving efficiencies in their building process.

Amy said something earlier, which I absolutely love, which is digital waste leads to physical waste. So that's exactly the kind of spirit that we are going into this project with. We want to digitize this entire process so that we can understand where there are opportunities to improve and have lower impact in the world-- next slide.

So one such example of our tools is how we are deploying multiscale optimization technology. This allows designers to explore the objectives and the constraints of a project from multiple points all across their design, make, and operate pipelines. So we're looking at that whole lifecycle and really optimizing for it. That's critical.

Data and relationships in the system are searchable and then mappable, which are giving designers a clear picture of the downstream impact of every design decision they make. Again, something that everybody's just spoken about, having the data and the knowledge about all the components all the way through and the effect it has on the final solution is really, really key to how this is going to operate in the future-- next slide. That's the same slide.

AMY MARKS: There we go.

MIKE HALEY: Yeah, yeah. This quarter, we're concluding our sustainability assessments of Factory OS Block 9 projects. So Block 9 is 141 studio apartment complex that's slated to open late this year in San Francisco-- next slide.

We've calculated material waste, material cost, embodied carbon, and operational carbon of one of the modules and one of the units of block 9. And now we've broken it down into all of the subcategories you're seeing on this slide. Now, this information can be used to optimize future designs and processes to further improve these metrics. Effectively, they become the baselines for what they want to do in the future-- next slide.

So that's great. But let's focus a little bit deeper now on the actual construction process itself. And let's explore how we can apply some of the learnings from manufacturing to industrialized construction. You saw Tiffany talking about the aerospace project. There's many places where we can take the learnings from manufacturing and bring it over to this world of industrialized construction, and hopefully leapfrog some of the processes-- next slide.

So a great example here is Apis Cor. So Apis Cor is a startup that designs and builds equipment that 3D prints with concrete. They joined our research technology network to solve design and manufacturing challenges of their equipment and grow their customer use cases-- next slide.

With their improved equipment after they'd work with us for a while, they completed the world's largest 3D printed building on site in Dubai, standing two storeys at 7,000 square feet. This is a project that was made possible by people that believed in the future of automation, and they were also willing to take a risk to try something new.

However, building codes vary all over the world. So they were also trying to explore how to overcome many of the limitations for innovation within the existing US building code. Through our network, they met fellow resident and internationally recognized engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, and together they paved the way forward-- next slide.

Producing a specification document to support every building permit application, and opening doors to 3D printing their first affordable housing units in the United States, including a non-profit organization in Florida with a development of 800 homes, a housing trust fund in Santa Barbara County resulting in the first 3D printed affordable home in California also using sustainable materials, and another in Louisiana, which happened to be the first 3D printed US multifamily home, so a really significant impact in how 3D printing is affecting housing and industrialized construction-- next slide.

So my last example, we're going to look at how we could further leverage the intersection that we talked about between manufacturing and industrialized construction by exploring robotic printing, materials science, sensors and data analytics-- remember, that was something that Amy talked a lot about in the beginning-- IoT, data flow is a critical part of that.

And we're going to look at it in the context of infrastructure, specifically bridges. So renowned design and engineering firm Dar approached Autodesk with a vision of reimagining their entire design and manufacturing process, specifically for these large civil engineering structures. The goal was to get to AI-driven workflows, while leveraging Dar legacy data and expertise to 3D print an active, sensorized, living bridge-- next slide.

We used generative design algorithms in Fusion 360 to design the bridge based on the constraints of the environment in which the bridge is being used. Generative design was also able to improve minimum wall thickness and overhang angles of the bridge. On the robot itself, we use single point thermal sensors to take the temperature of the parts and decide whether to pause or continue printing, making the entire process automated.

During printing, we can detect tiny temperature variations in the material, which could indicate future areas of weaknesses. This initial test bridge has been printed from ABS plastic with 20% carbon fiber. And once we're done with the test, it will be ground down and reused. The bridge also has embedded fiber optic strain sensors throughout it. So it's actually physically embedded into the material of the bridge, making it a living bridge.

The full scale bridge will ultimately use recycled plastic, allowing us to move past traditional material, and seek ones that have less of an impact on the world. Anyway, hopefully these projects give you some sense of the future potential that lies ahead for industrialized construction. And I'm going to hand it back over to Amy. Thank you.

AMY MARKS: Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate all of that. So what can our IC team do for you? At our Autodesk University, we participate in lots of events and customer briefings, as well as internal trainings within your organizations. And if you are participating in some of our executive councils, you'll see us participating in those as well. And we participated in many of those external councils and consortiums that exist around the globe.

We also, as Ryan mentioned, work with some product betas right now, especially between Inventor in Revit, and for manufacturing software to actually inform design and allow for to create products, instead of just prefabricating some things potentially downstream.

We're working very hard on platform integration to make sure the Autodesk platform supports everything that you're trying to accomplish on your journey in industrialized construction. And we are always obviously interested in any products that are out there that participate either with us as partners at Autodesk, that can become part of Autodesk, or part of the Autodesk platform in one of our partnership areas.

The other part on services, Tiffany talked a little bit about convergence consulting. And that is an area that's been exploding for us, as many of our customers are very interested in how we can assist them on not just productizing the physicality of these piece parts, but on the associated workflows that both Ryan and Alli Scott talked about, and how we connect these things together so that we have informed design, and then connecting design and make together.

You heard Mike talk about some amazing research. By the way, we had to choose from so many projects we could have talked about in research. Inclusive, not-- by the way, there's a little bit of a convergence between consulting and research as well, that they work so often together when we're doing these projects with our customers. And some of it we can work on today, and some where we're willing to take a little more risk where they work in conjunction together with both research and convergence consulting together.

And I would be remiss if I didn't talk about-- you heard Mike Haley talk about some of the fellows that were able to discuss some of those projects within the resident program, the residency program at our technology centers. They've gone virtual, not just in the locations you may have visited us at Autodesk before, but you can actually be a virtual resident.

And we're seeing lots of programs, lots of people talking with each other. There's tons of information, people doing business together that are part of these technology centers and the residency program, very important. And some of the cool stuff that's happening over there is not happening anywhere around the world, but for in these places.

So I know we have some questions and answers. And Az Jas-at, who also works in our industrialized construction team, is going to be taking us through some of those. I have a few questions, Az, that have come in already. Do you want me to start with some of those?

AZ JAS-AT: Yeah, you go ahead and start with those, please, while we're waiting for the audience to loosen up with some of their questions.

AMY MARKS: By the way, we always take questions and challenges. I've changed all of my Q&A slides to questions and challenges. We're open for that, as well. So, Ryan, let's start with you, because you talked a lot about, how do we move basically the make information of manufacturing and what we actually can fabricate and make in fabrication facilities and in manufacturing facilities. How do we move that information up in front of design? And there is two words I heard, both prefabrication as I mentioned, and productization. What's the difference between the two words that we talk about?

RYAN MCMAHON: Great question. Let's start with the latter part there. What's the difference between prefab and productization? I think prefab is part of the story. It's an opportunity to make something offsite, nearsite in a controlled environment, better safety, use fixturing, lots of benefits of working in that particular way.

But if you only ever make one of something, you miss out on a tremendous amount of benefit of scale and repeatability for making lots and lots of a particular item. So given that Mike showed the factory last video, if we were to make an apartment unit, and we made lots of-- how many-- there's 300 or some odd units in that building there.

We want to make a lot of similar things but not make them all identical. Can we define a product that represents that particular unit, and all the ways that we can vary it? So that, by doing that, now I get the advantage of being able to make something in a controlled environment, and be able and being able to define something and the ways that it can change so that we have a process that we can drive much more like manufacturing.

AMY MARKS: So if I think about Tiffany's slide, which by the way, Tiffany, I've been showing that slide for years. And sometimes construction and manufacturing folks agree on it, and sometimes they disagree. Because there aren't too many buildings that are like airplanes.

Although, I would tell you, all prefabricated are manufactured, and flies through the air, not sitting on the ground, same as ships. We don't have the risk of water and air. Our buildings are on the ground, mostly. But when I see that and I connect it to what Ryan is saying, we don't necessarily have to have all those pieces and parts look exactly as they look in that plane all the time.

You could vary some of those as the architect, and only use some of those parts in the building, and scale them differently, size them differently, change the capacities, and not have to make the entirety of the plane. So that's where you're looking at a lot of this stuff.

You're really morphing these customers, and taking what in proven manufacturing, and evolving them from construction companies in some cases, or owners that want to enable this, or architects and engineers. Tell me about how convergence consulting is best suited to do that at Autodesk?

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Sure. And you're absolutely right. I mean, that was why I said it was a bit provocative to share it. But it's the idea of bringing that methodology. It's not the one-to-one parody, it's the idea that we can bring these very foundational methodologies that we've used.

I mean, name of the industry across manufacturing, you often talk generators, there's ideas of automotive, as well. I mean, you could talk about this in a lot of different ways. But it's that idea, exactly what Ryan was just talking about around looking at things with that productization mindset, and then applying that to these industry strategies to be able to help people achieve what they need to achieve in their business tomorrow.

And that's truly the opportunities that we're seeing today with these customers is being able to-- we bridge gaps. And in Autodesk consulting today we have a team of enterprise solution architects, industry strategy business consultants, as well as technology experts within our team that all bridge those gaps across these industries to really help bring as much thought leadership and these methodology approaches to help people transition.

So no matter where people are in that journey with us, we can help them. We can see, OK, where are you today, and then how do you get to where you're trying to achieve to for tomorrow? And that's really the goal that we have in consulting.

AMY MARKS: You know it's crazy, Tiffany, we had a big event recently last June. And we had all of our biggest customers in the room. There were almost 1,000 people both virtually and in-person at another event. And we asked-- once we described what convergence was, we actually asked, how many of you would consider yourselves convergence customers, no longer just a contractor or just a subcontractor?

And 82% of the audience describe themselves as convergence customers. Now, if they're evolving into manufacturing, and we're a bunch of construction folks sitting in a room, it's like trying to be a manufacturer without having a manufacturer tell us how to be manufacturers.

That's the beauty of convergence consulting is that you get all the benefits of all the amazing manufacturing consulting we've done across the globe with unbelievable things that you and Mike have done. And we're really able to apply those things that seem like almost old hat to you. [INAUDIBLE] the AEC community. I mean, is that really what's happening with these customers? Are we using proven technologies that we've done forever?

TIFFANY BACHMEIER: Absolutely. And that's the joy and the excitement of being-- people might have looked, when you first did those bios why is this woman with the title of advanced manufacturing on this call, but that's why. Is because I lead a team of manufacturing experts, but that are being able to bridge those gaps, and bring those things into the construction industry for us to be able to achieve those goals.

So the things that we're doing with our manufacturing customers and we're helping them achieve the next possible and the next things that we're doing, we're then being able to also bring those methodologies and those industry expertise into the evolving world of that within construction.

AMY MARKS: Perfect-- oops, sorry, let me go back one. Perfect timing for Alli Scott. Alli, so now we just said, if you a bunch of construction people in the room, and architects, and engineers, and even owners that need our services, how many of these companies want to start, and have already started defining what they make?

Think all the fab shops, think-- how is that important, that prefabrication evolution to productization, to connect that to both design and then share it in construction? Tell me what's going on with the customers that we're seeing that are using the Autodesk construction cloud, and why this is important.

ALLISON SCOTT: Absolutely. So there's a couple of things happening. One, we already know, like you just said Amy, that there are a significant number of people in architecture, engineering, and construction that are no longer just bound by that singular definition. We see lots of firms across AEC deciding to go upstream and add more of the pre-construction, more design, more urban planning, more test fit solutions, pre-construction solutions to their bench.

We also see people going downstream and saying, hey, I want to get more into operations, and asset management, and providing digital twin solutions to my clients. So there is a massive shift in our entire industry for converging across our own industry lines, as well as dipping into cross industries like manufacturing that we've just described.

So where this becomes really interesting for things like the use of Autodesk construction Cloud and this notion of connected construction is that if we want to embrace new business models like this, if we want to take advantage of new profit margins, and new services, and new revenue streams, we cannot operate with the same way that we've been operating before.

Connected construction is way more than just digitizing the existing processes and the existing paper solutions and silos then we've been operating with in the past. We cannot expect acceleration in innovation by just digitizing a paper process. We've got to find ways to streamline and accelerate across the entire lifecycle.

So what I think is kind of interesting out of this is like, could we really imagine a world where an RFI never existed? I mean, I think that that's what we're trying to go for. That's exactly what Ryan is starting to identify. It's like, if we have product solutions that are baked into our own tools, we're going to get closer to that kind of reality.

The other interesting thing is that this is not just a problem, or a solution, or an opportunity for contractors. Architects are living this challenge every single day. Architects, in fact, have a lot of pressure on them. There's a ton amount, there's a ton of risk in their day-to-day jobs.

And we see this in their environments when their amount of design, the amount of detail that they have to give over to the contractor is significant. And yet somehow, it's still not enough. And why is it not enough? It's because those processes are disconnected.

So if we're able to take all of that rich data, geometry, and process that an architect and an engineer is creating in those early stages, and really transfer that over, and with a full picture in a holistic way to construction, wow, what kind of power does that unlock? And we are beginning to see this with a number of our customers.

In fact, I suggest that out of the people that are watching today, go check out a couple of different of our construction-oriented classes on AU in the session catalog. You can also absolutely watch the construction keynote tomorrow with Jim Lynch, Sameer Merchant and Brandon [INAUDIBLE].

We've got some great feedback from some of our customers that are talking about their process where they're talking about digital transformation and connecting this data between design and construction and down into operations. We also have some awesome interviews from contractors that are in the Watch Any Time section of the AU platform where you can learn a little bit more about these details in action today.

AMY MARKS: And you're there, too, Allison Scott. I know you-- I've seen you there. You're right there near where my thing is in the [INAUDIBLE].

ALLISON SCOTT: Yeah, we've got some great content from yourself and from me talking about how resiliency is enabled by digital transformation. You cannot future-proof your business without digital transformation, and what does that entail, and then you give us a great example with the transformation framework, and how you make it real, so yeah, really great content.

AMY MARKS: And so I know Az Jas-at, our moderator, we have lots of questions coming in, additional questions, should I pause and go to you before-- I want to definitely talk to Mike again, but--

AZ JAS-AT: They're coming thick and fast, but hey, why don't you drop that question off to Mike, and then we'll jump onto the audience questions after that.

AMY MARKS: Fantastic. So Mike, I think what's so cool about what you're doing over in research is that you are really-- you've been seeing the convergence happening before we did. So lots of these projects-- it's so interesting to me. As I look across and I sit on one of the boards over there in research, we're looking for more and more convergence customers that want us to solve for this.

Because as Allison said, I think it's so interesting. It's like you need that data, but that data just can't live in somebody's desktop. It has to actually not just live in some isolated place. We've got to be able to house it somewhere, share it, make sure that we know what to do with that data, test some things out.

Because the data is very different. I would love the world, by the way Allison, where there are no more RFIs. And I always say, we'll get there one product at a time. I think as we move to this, where buildings become more and more productized, it won't happen overnight.

We have to build like one digital book in a digital library at a time with the workflows with them. But what you are seeing over by you, Mike. What has really changed in the last few years, when you were already projecting this out years ago when we started working with these convergence customers. What's different now?

MIKE HALEY: Yeah, I mean, I think it's really, it's-- in and of itself, it's a convergence of a lot of factors. So, I mean, I've been working on cloud technologies, honestly, for 20 years, and, in fact, 20 years in construction. And I can tell you 20 years ago, people didn't want to put things even in the cloud. Uploading a document was kind of a weird thing to do.

That's not really an attitude anymore, so data is flowing into the cloud. But that's not enough. You're also seeing advancements in sensor technology. So I gave that example of the bridge with those fiber optic sensors, and it turns out you can 3D print fiber optic sensors and put it in stuff, and they're really cheap. So why not just do it all the time and collect all the data?

You're also seeing changes in manufacturing processes. So some of the stuff I showed you, some of the stuff Tiffany talked about. I mean, that's all changing at the same time. And then I think you've got all the pressures that Allison talked about. You want to do more, you want more detail, you want to get the stuff going.

So you've got all these factors happening concurrently. So you're right, we've seen this coming for more than a decade, to be honest. And this is one of the reasons I love running a research organization at Autodesk. Because we get to look through the lens of construction, manufacturing, entertainment even, and look at all of those things together.