Autodesk (NASDAQ:ADSK) CFO Janesh Moorjani said the company is seeing the benefits of years of investment in cloud, artificial intelligence and go-to-market changes, while also positioning the business for further margin expansion. Speaking with analyst Keith Weiss, Moorjani described Autodesk as a “stable, consistent, resilient growth business” supported by secular trends in construction technology adoption, manufacturing digitization and infrastructure investment.
Quarterly performance and demand backdrop
Moorjani said Autodesk’s fourth quarter delivered strength “across all fronts,” with performance holding up across verticals and geographies. He highlighted data centers and industrial buildings as areas of strength, and said emerging markets are also contributing as infrastructure build-outs continue.
Durability and diversification
Weiss raised Autodesk’s historical reputation as being more macro sensitive than many software peers, but Moorjani argued the business has grown more durable. He pointed to consistent growth over the past several years and emphasized diversification across architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), manufacturing and a smaller media and entertainment segment, as well as geographic diversification.
He also described how Autodesk has expanded beyond plan and design into construction (“make”) and is aiming to extend further into the “operate” phase over time. That shift, he said, could increase Autodesk’s involvement in projects from “months or years” to “decades,” reflecting the lifecycle of physical assets.
Margin expansion, restructuring, and go-to-market transition
On profitability, Moorjani discussed Autodesk’s reported margin expansion and the company’s expectation for additional improvement. He tied near-term margin dynamics to Autodesk’s “new transaction model,” under which the company has established a more direct ordering relationship with end customers in many developed markets while partners continue to play an important role.
Moorjani said the model has a “mechanical” accounting effect that increases both revenue and expense and creates a headwind to operating margin in percentage terms, though not in operating profit dollars. He said Autodesk expects to absorb roughly 100 basis points of that headwind as it expands margins.
He also discussed a workforce reduction of about 7% as the “final step” in a broader go-to-market optimization. A restructuring a year earlier largely reduced non-selling roles such as customer success, marketing and sales operations, with some reinvestment to build new capabilities. The more recent restructuring impacted some sellers as well, which he said is being paired with new tools to engage customers more efficiently.
Moorjani said savings are expected to be partially reinvested, including:
- Rebuilding selling capacity in different locations with different skill sets
- Investment back into marketing
- Core R&D work, particularly around AI and platform initiatives
He described the company’s margin outlook as reflecting restructuring savings net of reinvestment, inherent operating leverage, and the accounting headwind from the transaction model.
AI strategy: internal productivity and customer monetization
Moorjani said Autodesk has been using AI internally, initially encouraging broad experimentation and later scaling developer-focused tools. He said the company has rolled out “Cloud Code” widely, improving developer productivity. Rather than using AI primarily to reduce headcount, he framed the opportunity as shifting some spending from “headcount dollars to technology dollars” to increase development velocity.
On customer-facing AI, Moorjani said Autodesk began investing in AI nearly a decade ago, including early work in generative design. He argued AI can help customers address core constraints—capacity, productivity and risk reduction—by enabling teams to take on more projects with the same staffing and by preventing costly downstream errors through improvements earlier in planning and design.
Moorjani outlined three monetization layers Autodesk is targeting:
- Task automation: AI features embedded in products that make users more productive, monetized through the traditional seat-based subscription model.
- Workflow automation: broader automation that becomes more usage- or consumption-oriented.
- System automation: automation across workflows or projects, also more consumption-based and resource intensive.
He said the company is still early in adoption, with initial launches skewing toward task automation, while workflow and system automation are on the roadmap. He also noted Autodesk already has experience with consumption models, saying that in fiscal 2025 about 17% of the business was consumption-based.
Weiss asked about the impact of more compute-intensive AI workloads on margins. Moorjani said these offerings are expected to be gross profit dollar accretive but will likely pressure gross margin percentage over the long term, a factor Autodesk has considered in its long-term margin targets.
Construction, Fusion, and the role of data
In AEC, Moorjani said Autodesk began extending beyond design into construction in 2018, citing construction as one of the least digitized industries with thin margins and high risk. He emphasized the opportunity to improve productivity and risk management for general contractors and subcontractors, and to connect owners, designers and builders on a collaborative platform across the project lifecycle.
On differentiation—particularly in an AI-driven environment—Moorjani said Autodesk’s advantage comes down to “data, context, and expertise.” He said Autodesk can train models using customer project data (while customers retain ownership), giving the company an edge over models trained only on public or limited datasets. He also stressed that design and construction decisions require deep project context—such as code compliance and downstream impacts across systems like mechanical, electrical and plumbing.
For Autodesk Construction Cloud, Moorjani said adoption and “landing points” vary by project type and buyer persona. He described data centers as a key area where sophisticated owner-operators may dictate the project’s technology stack, while in other projects general contractors may make the technology decisions.
In manufacturing, Moorjani described Fusion’s opportunity as tied to digitization needs across mid-market manufacturers. He said much of Fusion’s historical adoption has been in small deployments, but Autodesk sees room to grow by moving into “10 to 20 seat accounts” as it adds data management capabilities, noting releases in fiscal 2026 with more planned for fiscal 2027 and beyond.
Moorjani also discussed Autodesk’s ambitions in operations for both building and manufacturing, saying the company’s approach will be similar to its construction strategy, using acquisitions as anchor points and “building around them.”
On generative AI for 3D, Weiss asked about Project Bernini. Moorjani said Bernini began in Autodesk’s research labs and that Autodesk has since developed additional foundation models trained on customer datasets, which he said are delivering stronger and more cost-effective results for Autodesk’s domains. He said more product launches are expected “over the course of the next few months,” with monetization of more compute-intensive workloads unfolding over a longer period.
Looking ahead, Moorjani said Autodesk is being “a little bit cautious in the near term” due to disruption in the sales organization related to restructuring and the formation of expansion teams, which he said is reflected in guidance. Beyond that, he reiterated confidence in the company’s long-term growth drivers, supported by secular trends, product investments and go-to-market execution.
About Autodesk (NASDAQ:ADSK)
Autodesk, Inc (NASDAQ: ADSK) is a software company that develops design and creation tools for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), manufacturing, and media and entertainment industries. Headquartered in San Rafael, California, the company was founded in 1982 and is best known for pioneering CAD (computer-aided design) software. Autodesk sells products and services to a global customer base, including architects, engineers, contractors, product designers, and content creators.
The company’s product portfolio includes industry-standard design and modeling applications such as AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, Fusion 360, Maya and 3ds Max, as well as cloud-based collaboration and project management platforms like BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud.
