Autodesk, Inc. Q1 FY2027 Earnings Call

Hello, and welcome to the Q1 Fiscal Year 27 Autodesk Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star-11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand has been raised. To withdraw your question, please press star-11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Vice President Investor Relations, Simon May Smith.

Thanks, Operator, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining our conference call to discuss Autodesk Fiscal 27 First Quarter Results. Andrew Alagnost, our CEO, and Janesh Mourjani, our CFO, are on the line with me. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including outlook and related assumptions on products, artificial intelligence, sales and marketing optimization, go-to-market strategies, trends, and pending transactions, actual events or results could differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10K and the Form 8K filed with today's press release for important risks and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today. If this call is replayed or reviewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information. Autodesk disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. We will quote several numerical growth changes during this call as we discuss our financial performance. Unless otherwise noted, each such reference represents a year-on-year comparison. All non-GAAP numbers referenced in today's call are reconciled in our press release and supplemental materials available on our investor relations website, where you will also find a presentation deck on the acquisition announced today. And now I will turn the call over to Andrew.

Thank you, Simon, and welcome everyone to the call. We delivered strong Q1 fiscal 27 results today with revenue and earnings per share above the high end of guidance ranges, and this outperformance flows through to our full year guidance. Today we shared in a separate announcement that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MaintainX, a leading modern maintenance and asset operations solutions used by organizations to manage and optimize day-to-day operations. The acquisition reflects Autodesk's commitment to becoming a long-term leader in operations and builds upon Autodesk Operations Solutions, AOS, capabilities in digital twins and factor design. I'm going to devote my opening remarks to operations and will return to our other strategic initiatives after Dinesh's discussion of our financial performance and guidance. Autodesk's strategy is to converge, design, make, and operate data and context continuously through the full lifecycle. This benefits owners, designers, builders, manufacturers, and operators through increased efficiency and resilience and reduced risk and downtime. Operations is highly complementary to the design and make category, reflecting growing customer demand and more continuous data-driven workflows from concept through to operation and optimization. With this expansion in operations, we plan to unlock higher value system-level AI, extend our duration with assets and systems from years to decades, and meaningfully expand our addressable market. MaintainX helps organizations manage maintenance, assets, and frontline operations with a modern, mobile-first platform with pre-built integrations that serve as both a system of record and action for day-to-day operational workflows. It's led by world-class engineering and AI talent and delivers a scalable go-to-market growth motion for operations and strong expansion potential across customer segments, geographies, and adjacent use cases. Its position as a key component of maintenance and operational activity gives Autodesk access to rich data on asset condition and history, inspections, maintenance patterns, and real-world performance. Bringing MaintainX into Autodesk begins to build the data and context loop that enables a new generation of more integrated, data-driven, and AI-powered capabilities, connecting digital design and make with real-world performance to deliver predictive maintenance, intelligent automation, and real-time decision support. In short, we are excited to welcome the MaintainX team to Autodesk, and this acquisition will position us to help our customers increase efficiency and resilience and reduce risk and downtime through convergence. Jinesh, over to you to discuss our quarterly financial performance and guidance.

Thanks, Andrew. Q1 was another strong quarter. Overall, the underlying momentum of the business was consistent with prior quarters and a bit better than the assumptions we'd built into our guidance range, with strength coming from similar industry segments in AECO, particularly in construction and emerging markets. Our sales reorganization is proceeding as planned. The overall impact to new subscription growth was within the range of our expectations, while upfront revenue was less impacted than we expected. Renewal rates remained strong. Total revenue in the first quarter grew 18% as reported and 16% in constant currency. As expected, the new transaction model provided a tailwind of roughly 3.5 percentage points to revenue growth in the first quarter. Please see the tables in our press release, earnings deck, and Excel financials for details by product and region. Billings increased 18% as reported and 15% in constant currency. The new transaction model provided a tailwind of roughly 1.5 percentage points to billings growth in the first quarter. We completed the transition to annual billings for most multi-year contracts during the quarter, so there will no longer be noise in billings from that transition, but with the ongoing reduction in the level of multi-year discounting, we expect the shift from multi-year to annual contracts will continue to benefit price realization while also weighing on unbilled deferred revenue growth. Turning to margins, first quarter gap and non-gap operating margins were 28% and 39% respectively. Gap operating margin increased approximately 14 percentage points, primarily due to the absence of one-time charges and underlying margin improvements. Non-GAAP operating margin was up approximately 2 percentage points. This primarily reflected operating leverage and the benefits from our sales optimization. First quarter free cash flow of $876 million benefited from typical seasonal strength, partly offset by cash restructuring costs. Moving on to capital allocation, we repurchased approximately 1.9 million shares during the quarter for $448 million. dollars. We continue to expect our share buyback in fiscal 27 to be similar to fiscal 26 in total dollars. We expect to maintain a healthy buyback program that continues to apply approximately 50 percent of free cash flow to further reduce share count over time. Our capital allocation framework is unchanged. In addition to share repurchases, we still plan to deploy cash to the highest return opportunities, prioritizing organic investment in R&D, including cloud platform and AI, and accelerating the realization of our strategy with targeted and tuck-in acquisitions. MaintenX is a good example of this and will be the cornerstone in scope and scale of our acquisition investment in operations. Building on our successful expansion in construction, we're applying the same playbook to expand in operations. The foundation is the same, a cornerstone acquisition of an established and disruptive market leader with a strong go-to-market motion. We expect to fund the acquisition of MaintenX through a combination of cash on hand and debt financing. MaintenX expects to achieve in excess of $135 million of annualized recurring revenue this calendar year, with growth in excess of 50%. We expect the transaction to close later this fiscal year, subject to regulatory approvals. We will include the impact of the acquisition and our guidance after the transaction closes. We intend to absorb the margin dilution from MaintenX within our Fiscal 27 and Fiscal 29 margin goals. After close, MaintenX will be integrated into Autodesk Operations Solutions, or AOS, under Steve Hooper, SVP of AOS. As many of you who have met him over the years know, Steve brings the product vision, go-to-market expertise, and decades of operational experience at scale to turn AOS into our next major growth engine. Let me finish with guidance. Our guidance philosophy is unchanged. Our guidance continues to be based on the range of possible outcomes in our bottom-up sales forecast, which is grounded in the momentum of business and embeds prudent to reflect temporary risk to billings and revenue as we operationalize our sales optimization plan. Full-year guidance assumptions that we described last quarter remain largely unchanged. We assume the macroeconomic environment will remain broadly stable through the year. Billings and revenue guidance continue to reflect potential disruption from our sales restructuring, consistent with the plan we laid out in February and what we saw in the first quarter. We continue to expect billings to be slightly more weighted to the second half, in part reflecting that disruption, and in part due to the weighting of our largest EBA cohort in the fourth quarter. Noise from the new transaction model will significantly diminish during the year, from an approximately 3.5 percentage point tailwind to revenue growth in Q1, to approximately 2 percentage points in Q2, and averaging out at approximately 1.5 percentage points for the full year. We will talk about it less as that noise fades. Non-GAAP margins will continue to reflect ongoing operating leverage, savings from restructuring, and sustained investments in our long-term strategic priorities. Free cash flow in Fiscal 27 will continue to reflect discrete restructuring outflows and tax benefits. The net effect of these discrete cash movements is immaterial to free cash flow in Fiscal 27. Our U.S. federal cash tax payments will begin to normalize in Fiscal 28. We continue to manage our stock-based compensation with discipline. We expect SPC to fall below 10% of revenue in fiscal 27, continuing the trend of the last few years. Reflecting all this for fiscal 27, we've raised the bottom end of our prior billings guidance to a range of $8.505 billion to $8.58 billion, reflecting the sustained momentum of the business. We've raised our revenue guidance to a range of $8.155 billion to $8.215 billion, reflecting reflecting our strong results in the first quarter. Our GAAP operating margin guidance range is 26 to 28%. We've raised our non-GAAP operating margin guidance to approximately 39%, reflecting our increased revenue guidance. We've also raised the bottom end of our free cash flow guidance to a range of $2.725 billion to $2.8 billion. In summary, we remain disciplined and focused on the controllable factors that drive our revenue, operating margin, earnings per share, and capital allocation, which are the key building blocks of free cash flow per share. The slide deck on our website has modeling assumptions for the second quarter and full fiscal year 27. Andrew, back to you. Thank you, Janash.

Autodesk is focused on convergence, powered by our platform, industry clouds, and AI. Let me give you some examples of our progress in the quarter that demonstrate how this differentiated strategy works. For our customers in architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and operations, Convergence increases efficiency and resilience and reduces risk and downtime. All of this is in service of deploying fewer resources to every project so they can bid on and win more projects with the resources they have. As you can see in the performance of MAKE, Forma for Construction's revenue growth accelerated again and has strong momentum with owners, designers, GCs, and subcontractors seeking to converge design and construction workflows. Once again, customers are choosing to consolidate fragmented legacy systems onto Autodesk Plus. For example, Dome Construction, an ENR Top 400 general contractor, selected Forma for Construction to replace disconnected legacy point solutions and standardized workflows across pre-construction, VDC, project execution, cost management, and turnover. In Europe, Essex Services Group, a leading UK building services contractor, signed a multi-year enterprise agreement for FormaBuild to consolidate fragmented systems across complex data center and commercial projects. And Germany's largest municipal water utility, Berlin Water, expanded its use of Autodesk solutions, including FormaDesign collaboration, to modernize collaboration across water infrastructure planning and delivery. These stories have a common theme, converging people, processes, and data across the project lifecycle to increase efficiency and resilience, decrease risk, and prepare for an agentic AI world. Our comprehensive end-to-end industry clouds and platform drive convergence and extend our footprint further into the larger growth segment. In manufacturing, customers are demanding convergence as they invest in their digital transformation to leverage granular and unified data and embrace AI-driven automation capable of industry transformation. By consolidating on our platform, customers have the flexibility and connectivity across workflows to increase agility, innovation, and resilience. For example, Lowe Services, the shared services of the Friedhelm Lowe Group, a German industrial technology conglomerate, renewed and expanded its enterprise agreement with Autodesk to better connect CAD, product data management, and enterprise systems, reducing fragmentation and accelerating time to market. In the U.S., a leading automotive manufacturer renewed its enterprise agreement with Autodesk to advance its factory of the future strategy, standardizing on Autodesk solutions across digital factory and AECO workflows to reduce vehicle lead times and scale factory design simulation across 14 factories for more proactive, data-driven production planning. In addition, a visual display and fabrication company replaced a legacy design solution with Fusion after a multi-month evaluation, connecting design and manufacturing in the cloud to reduce handoffs and move projects through development faster. And in Europe, Scheidel, a leading manufacturer of Chimney Systems, implemented an integrated inventor, vault, and Fusion workflow to automate product configuration, generating thousands of modular component variants automatically to fast-track assembly and drawing creation. All of this was reflected in Fusion's accelerating growth. Let me finish by talking about AI. As I said last quarter, building agentic AI requires data, context, and expertise. What differentiates Autodesk is that we have all three at scale, and each one is scarce. We have scarce geometric-rich data from real design and make workflows that lets us build frontier 3D foundation models grounded in how the built world is actually designed and made. We have real-world workflow context, including design intent, constraints, constructability, coordination, and trade-offs that enable industry-specific MCP and agentic-based workflows that work reliably across the lifecycle. And we have deep domain and technical expertise that translates data and context into trusted products, defensible IP, and knowledge graphs built for professional-grade outcomes. That foundation matters because our customers do not just need AI that can generate. They need AI that produces outputs that are correct in the real world. That is a hard problem, and we are using a hybrid approach to solve it. We are combining probabilistic AI generation with deterministic engineering validation using parametric and physics-based engines designed to reason about the physical world in 3D so AI-generated outcomes can be validated against real-world constraints. Simply put, AI can generate and our engines can validate. Let me unpack that a bit. Frontier models are incredibly capable, but they are still fundamentally vision and language systems. Simply generating drawings is very different from understanding how something performs, behaves, or can actually be manufactured and constructed. For our customers, that accuracy matters. Through assistance and MCP infrastructure, Autodesk provides the harness layer that makes frontier models more controllable, context-aware, and useful across the lifecycle. Autodesk Assistant is a good example already in market, and there are even more powerful tools on the way. But we are going much further than MCP and agent-based workflows. Autodesk 3D Foundation models use decades of engineering intelligence combined with trusted product engines to directly reason about geometry and physical relationships. enabling workflows like similarity search, drawing dimensions, constraints, building plans, and geometry-aware automation. Auto-constraint infusion and more expansive features like our soon-to-be-launched building layout explorer Informa are good examples of our progress here. When Autodesk AI generates a design, revision, manufacturing toolpath, routing layout, or simulation setup, that output is validated to the same core parametric models from Autodesk that our customers have trusted for decades. These systems perform deterministic checks for geometric integrity, manufacturability, constructability, standards compliance, and performance. Every validation loop also improves the platform itself, continuously strengthening our AI models, validation systems, and quality thresholds over time. With MaintainX, we intend to extend those capabilities to develop digital twins that move beyond descriptive and informative models to high-value predictive and autonomous workflows and systems. This combination of probabilistic AI generation and deterministic engineering validation is why we said last quarter that 3D-igantic AI requires high-fidelity, geometry-rich data, deep industry context embedded in real-world design and make processes, and specialized 3D-AI expertise. Few companies have all these. Autodesk does. It's why we believe Autodesk will define the next generation of industrial AI. Operator, we would now like to open the call up for questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. One moment, please. The first question comes from the line of Sackett, Kalia with Barclays.

Okay, great. Hey, guys, thanks for taking my questions here, and congrats on MaintainX. Thanks, Sackett.

Thank you, Sackett.

Sure thing. Andrew, maybe that's a good place to start with you. Broadly speaking, could you just give us a bit more color on MaintainX as a company and how it maybe helps further Autodesk's sort of strategic goals long-term?

Yeah, I think that's an excellent place to start, Sackett. So let's start with the broader strategic context. At Autodesk, our goal is to converge the entire built-world lifecycle from design, make all the way through operate and close that loop. You've already seen us make a lot of great progress in the design and make side of this. You've seen what we've done in manufacturing construction. Now we're moving more aggressively into operations. And this is going to unlock a deeper and broader data and context layer that makes our capabilities more powerful in the agentic world. It's gonna unlock a $40 billion TAM for us. And it's also gonna advance our digital twin strategy from static to dynamic and ultimately to predictive. And let me tell you a little bit about the scope of our ambition and then how MaintainX plays into it. Our scope spans all the way from product manufacturing through to critical infrastructure like water and data centers through transportation, which is like airports into commercial buildings. And if you just look narrowly at the product manufacturing piece, today we can build static twins with tandem, dynamic twin capabilities that help define how a factory works with FlexSim, and ultimately look at the operations with Fusion operations. But what MaintainX brings us is the field execution and data piece, the actual asset data piece. They're the fastest growing company in the space. They're rapidly consolidating a lot of the space onto their platform, and there's a reason for that. And what they're bringing to us is not only that expertise at the point of work where the assets are functioning. They're bringing to us a rich set of data about asset performance in the real world. This data is going to help us move along that spectrum from static to dynamic to predictive. And midsize and small manufacturers are going to be a big place where we're going to be testing this out. So it's an exciting growth opportunity, and it has a lot of potential for Autodesk, and it kind of completes that whole vision of design, make, operate, and closing that

loop in that data and context layer. That makes a ton of sense. Maybe for my follow-up, you know, Janesh, I think you compared Autodesk's entrance into operations to your entrance into construction, which a lot of us on the call remember years ago. Maybe the question is, how has that experience in construction maybe informed this expansion into operations? Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. And maybe I'll ask Andrew to comment a little bit on the learnings from the construction experience, since a lot of that happened even before I arrived, and then I can talk a little bit about how we translated that over to maintenance.

Yeah, all right. Thank you, Janesh. It's another good question, Saka. Let me kind of start with this. When we started construction, we took a set of assets that we had in pre-construction planning and in collaboration with 3D models in the cloud and some early assets we had around punch lists and field assets. And then we brought in an experienced leader at Autodesk who knew how to scale a new business. Jim Lynch, in particular, he scaled the Revit business inside of Autodesk and was a critical part of that growth. We brought in people like Paul Blandini that were also part of that. And then what we did is we engaged in a series of acquisitions that expanded us into places where we didn't have coverage field execution was a key area in that space look at what we're doing with maintain x it's field execution field data where where things are happening on the site this enabled us to do a lot of automations and capabilities around request for information flows and all the things associated with construction we then went on to expand that and consolidated into into a group we ran it independently inside the company look at the results all right five years ago we spent about 1.8 billion dollars on acquisitions today you look look at this business today going back 12 months it's worth almost 600 million dollars in revenue and it's growing north of 20 percent so pretty impressive results so how does this translate into what we're doing with operations i think we can actually do a lot more in operations today we're putting an experienced leader that scaled fusion in its early days that's that's steven hooper we're bringing back paul Blandini into the operations team. He has a lot of the chops from that. We're bringing in a best in class field execution, onsite maintenance and asset aware solution into our portfolio, MaintainX, a great team that knows how to build this kind of technology, a great team that's already built AI-driven workflows based on some of that data. And then we're going to work to incrementally bring in some smaller acquisitions over time that round out the solution. So follow the same playbook, integrate the things that we need to integrate quickly, hold back in the things that drive the health of the business, run the same playbook. And I think we're going to have even more impressive results than what you've seen with construction.

Great to hear. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jay Bashauer with Griffin Securities.

Thank you. Good evening. Andrew, among the critical technical ingredients of your growth strategy are, of course, platform services plus the AEC data model and the manufacturing data model. The question is, could you talk about production deployments of any or all of those among your customers in AEC and manufacturing? And apropos of today's news, how do you see the MaintainX acquisition fitting technically into those architectural initiatives around data models. Then I'll ask my follow-up.

Yeah, so as you know, the usage of our APIs and the AEC data model and the manufacturing data model by our customers continues to go up month after month after month. They're using it to provide real solutions. We're actually monetizing some of that API usage today. We continue to create granular solutions for our data and granular capabilities. All of these are tools that our customers will be able to plug into, but that we also plug into to create some of the agentic workflows that we're doing for our customers. So it's really important to look at the progress we're doing there. When you look at MaintainX, it brings another piece of granular data, asset performance data into the cycle. This is actually going to be valuable for some of our customers to actually build new businesses on from our stack. So, our goal is our customers should be doing more projects, bidding on more projects, winning more projects, and getting a larger slice of the lifecycle of the built world. This is another way we enable this. Our customers are going to be able to expand their offerings to their customers through some of the new types of granular data we'll be able to offer through the asset layer as well. So, it's another way of rounding things out, not only for our customers, but for us as well. So it's going to be pretty exciting.

Okay. Another technology question. As you're aware, there was a very interesting AEC industry conference two weeks ago in London, which had many themes relevant to the company, one of which I thought was quite interesting was the theme among many customers that presented of developing their own tools to either supplement commercially available tools, potentially even just use their own tools for their design and engineering. Could you talk about that potential phenomenon of customers developing, at least in AEC, some of their own homegrown tools?

We absolutely want them to do this, Jay. We have a long history of enabling our customers to expand our offerings to build tools that fit for their solutions. Now, when you look at the agentic world, remember, though, that there's this important critical mass around data and context that extends beyond any single customer. No single customer is going to have enough data to fully understand the scope and impact of a project, nor will they have the entire context of the project. Remember, context for a project flows across companies and across silos within a particular project. It is an ecosystem problem. And we're well positioned to orchestrate the ecosystem at the data and context layer. So we're going to add a lot of model capability that is really above and beyond what any of our customers can build on their own. But we encourage them and we want to enable them to build vertical capabilities on top of this that make their environments and their practices even more rich and more powerful. But they're going to need a strong platform to do that, and that strong platform is going to be built on the data context and expertise that we bring to play.

Okay. Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Adam Borg with Stiefel.

Awesome, and thanks so much for taking the questions. uh maybe andrew for you um you know in our channel check conversations we did hear about partners talking about you know degree of disruption from the go-to-market changes you guys made i know you talked about those changes really being in line with expectations so i was hoping maybe you'd go a step deeper about you know how those changes have played out and any future risk of further disruptions and how that's and maybe for janice to remind us how that's uh

played in the guy yeah so remember let's talk about the goals of these changes right The goal is to focus the entire ecosystem on new business generation, capturing and growing new businesses. So we shifted away from renewals as a big part of the partner business to new businesses as an emerging bigger part of the partner's business. And we also moved to automating some of the processes around renewals so that we could get better renewal performance and more focus on the new business. Actually, we saw that in the quarter. We saw strong renewal performance, and we saw exactly the kind of week-new performance we expected as people shift over to this. We expect this to all work its way out over time as the channel partners kind of get their hands around how their teams are reconfigured to build out new business. And we're looking forward to seeing the results. Ginesh, do you want to comment on anything?

Yeah, I'll just add that Q1 played out in line with the assumptions that we had baked into the guidance for the new subscriptions. We saw strength everywhere else. That contributed to the strong outperformance that we had here in the quarter. And then looking ahead, we have assumed just the gradual normalization, not a step function improvement, looking out to Q2 to Q4. Ultimately, the objective is to emerge with an organization that is much, much more effective at driving new business growth over the long term, and that sets us up nicely for the future.

That's great. And maybe just as my quick follow-up, it's really nice to see the consistent year-on-year growth by geography. America's EMEA and APAC all 16% to 17%. Maybe just drilling deeper into EMEA, just given a lot of noise in that market more broadly, anything to call out there in terms of headwinds and opportunities?

Thanks so much. Yeah, I think the biggest drivers for EMEA were really some of the timing and comparison dynamics that you see. EMEA had strong upfront revenue last quarter, and last quarter was also the peak of the new transaction model tailwind in EMEA. And if you recall, EMEA lagged the Americas by one quarter. So that's what you're really seeing play out here in the numbers for Q1. The other thing I would just touch on also is that we knew going into the year that the sales reorganization would just take longer to operationalize in certain parts of EMEA, just given local labor laws and consultation requirements. And that timing was concentrated in the guidance, but you also see that reflected in the EMEA performance overall. But broadly, EMEA is a very important region for us, and we continue to see great long-term opportunity across both mature and emerging markets there.

Really helpful. Thanks again.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brent Hill with Jeffries.

Thank you. Just on the acquisition, if you kind of roll forward the 50% growth, you're paying 18 times next year's revenue. And I think many are asking, in a world where software multiples have collapsed pretty significantly, you're paying a pretty big premium. And I'm assuming there's a reason for that premium. So maybe if you could share your thoughts on how you got to the number.

Yeah, I'm happy to start, and maybe Andrew can add as well. But when we looked at maintenance, Brent, for us, we looked at it as a high-growth market-leading platform. It's really defining the next generation of operations software. It's a large strategic adjacency for us, so it expands our TAM. But importantly, beyond the standalone strength of the business, it also gives us very rich operational data and workflow context that really allows us to close the entire loop across design, make, and operate. And it strengthens our overall AI foundation as a combined company. So it really enables higher value workflows over time. We talked a little bit earlier about the construction playbook that we used, and Andrew mentioned these numbers. But in construction, we deployed about $1.8 billion of capital through acquisitions. And we've built a business that's close to $600 million of revenue, LCM that's growing more than 20% here in Q1. So if you sort of think of that in a similar analogy, we expect operations to become an even bigger business than construction over time, just given the TAM. And given the growth rate of the business, the revenue multiple will compress pretty quickly

on a forward basis as the business scales. Yeah, I think Jinesh said it pretty good. I'll just add on and double down on this notion of the fact that the data that we're getting about asset performance and asset life cycles is incredibly valuable to us. It allows us to move up the spectrum from the operational and the static and dynamic twins into the predictive world. That's going to provide a lot of value to the mid-market customers we serve. It's going to provide high-value AI-driven solutions that do things that most small and mid-sized players are not able to do without some of these tools. So look for us to really dig deeply into that layer of this asset because it's a very important component of it for our context and data strategy.

And just a quick clarification, is this the largest deal you've ever done?

This is the largest deal we've ever done.

Okay. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Brent.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jason Salino with KeyBank Capital Markets.

Great. Thank you. um i'm just trying to understand the main maintain x you know business a little bit better like who would be the core user would it be internal operations maintenance yeah people and then i you know went on the website and it looks like some reference customers or some some consumer companies some janitorial service companies so do you have any overlapping customers today

yeah we absolutely have overlapping customers in the manufacturing seg sectors and and machine operating sectors that do overlap with us. The core user is the person actually owning the asset who has a high concern about uptime and managing and maintaining that uptime. It allows them to get the maintenance people out into the facility, track what needs to be fixed, track how it needs to be fixed. And the value we're going to bring moving forward is we're going to be able to turn that into a predictive cycle and a closed loop into being able to allow them to optimize facilities I think the greatest example you can use here is what happens in a small and mid-sized factory where they're trying to highly automate their processes and try to create a digital twin of the operational capabilities of their factory and reconfigure that factory on a regular basis and keeping it running as much as they possibly can. That's going to be a big opportunity for us with regards to the predictive twin capability.

Okay. And then maybe just a clarification for Janesh. I think in the prepared remarks for the PowerPoint, you mentioned that you were, you know, maintaining the fiscal 29 operating margin, you know, framework. Did that original framework contemplate a strategic acquisition like this? And I guess how would you look to absorb and, you know, maintain margin framework, you know, with this asset and potential future tuck-ins?

Yeah, Jason, it's a great question. When we laid out that framework, we had assumed that we could achieve that objective under a range of different kinds of scenarios, which included potential acquisitions as well. Ultimately, the business is generating a healthy amount of operating leverage, and we use that operating leverage to both achieve margin goals as well as reinvest back in the business to drive sustainable and durable growth for the future. Some of that can be organic. Some of that can be inorganic. And that's what you've seen us do over here today. While MainTnext itself does not have the margin profile that Autodesk does, we are going to absorb that business into Autodesk and stay true to our margin goals while continuing to balance investments that we need to make in the business as well.

Perfect. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. thank you our next question comes from the line of taylor mcginnis with ubs yeah hi thanks so much

um for for taking my questions uh janesh if i ran my math right it looks like the guide for adjusted constant currency billings implies around high single digits growth for the remainder of the year and i think revenue you know growth is closer to 10 or so so could you just unpack the delta there was, was there any pull forward of deals into 1Q, or is that just a reflection of the impact from some of the sales changes? And then secondly, not to throw too many questions at you, but I believe you made a comment about a benefit from price realization to billings, but that also weighing on unbilled deferred revenue growth. So I'm wondering if you could just unpack that a little bit more specifically with RPO growth of 9 percent. Yeah, I'm happy to touch on both of

those, Taylor. So in terms of the overall growth profile for both billings and revenue, keep in mind it's really the effect of the sales reorg that we had where you see the effect show up in billings first and then you see the effect show up in revenue over time. So that's one piece that you need to just keep in mind and our guidance largely reflects that in terms of the pace of normalization of new business productivity coming back into the sales team as we go through the reorganization and complete the operationalization of that. That's probably the biggest piece to think about with respect to the guidance. And then in terms of the RPO and the price realization, RPO can move around in any period. It is affected by a number of things, including contract durations, timing, currency. And in our case, as you know, it's also affected by the impact of the new transaction model, which is now starting to wear off. And so in Q1, what we saw was RPO growth was a bit slower, in part reflecting slightly shorter contract durations. That follows the change that we had been making to reduce discounting on multi-year contracts. So that represents a really good economic trade-off for us, because the price realization is longer term. Over multi-years, when we go out and secure the renewals in the future, those will be at the undiscounted levels or the lower discounted levels compared to what we had in the past. So that's a longer-term play, but it does impact the RPO and particularly the unbilled deferred RPO in the near term. But it is a good economic tradeoff for us and one that we consciously may. So customer relationships are healthy, and we have a strong foundation of renewal rates, so we feel pretty good about the underlying momentum of the business.

Thanks so much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alexey Gogolev with J.P. Morgan.

Hello, everyone. Janesh, could I build on the previous question, please? So when customers consider their contracts, what drives the decision between multi-year and annual contracts? Is there any element of budget uncertainty or some perceived switching flexibility or maybe cloud and AI roadmaps? And does it differ by IECO or manufacturing or maybe by enterprises versus S&B?

Yeah, it's a great question, Alexei. It's less about budgets or anything of that sort. For us, I think it's really just a couple of issues. one that I just touched on, which is that we reduced some of the discounting on multi-year contracts because we have such a strong foundation on strong renewal rates, and we felt confident that it was the right thing to do for the business long term. And the second thing that I'll call out is that there can be sort of timing issues and cohort mix issues as well. EBAs tend to be three year contracts. A lot of our product subscriptions tend to be one year contracts. And so just depending on some of the mix of what's up for renewal and what's not up for renewal, you can see some level of fluctuation there too. But that's all just normal and part of the ongoing business. So there was nothing unique or specific that I would call out other than those factors

here in Q1. Okay. Thank you. And Andrew, you referenced the assistance and MCP infrastructure and the harness layer for frontier models. What's the near-term product roadmap, where it shows up first and what customers can do that they couldn't do before yeah so there's a there's numerous

things that we built into the assistant layer that customers are going to be able to do that they haven't done before coming out very shortly is what's called the the building layout explorer it's going to be built into the the form of building design suite it allows people to explore the layout of of a building within within the framework of the of the envelope for the building that they're proposing and that they're exploring. These are the kind of capabilities that are built off of models that we've created ourselves that allow customers to do things that they would not be able to do dynamically with some of the other kind of horizontal large language model tools. We're also going to be building in additional capabilities that bring in some of our vertical tools into the assistant workflow so that they can actually dynamically create some user interfaces that solve particular problems for them. Again, going to be unique to the Assistant. I don't want to say too much because we're going to have a lot of announcements at AU that kind of tell people where we're going, but you're going to see us add a lot more to the layer between the Frontier models and what the Assistant does and some of the capabilities that Autodesk builds on top. Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Joe Brunk with Bayard.

Hi, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Does something like Claude for Creative Work and Autodesk Involvement become a channel for new customer, new user acquisition to the point where you'd actually see new subscriber and seat growth accelerate? Or maybe if it's not clawed for creative work, but more holistically about what you're doing with MCP servers, does this become a format where just the usability around your models make the applications more applicable to, like, people that wouldn't naturally be key users of Autodesk?

Whenever you meet the customers where you're at, you bring new customers into the ecosystem. And part of what we're doing is to meet the customers where they're at. We pull them into the ecosystem, and then they're able to explore the capabilities that we're able to help them finish above and beyond what they do in some of these other layers. So this is absolutely a channel for us, but it's also meeting the customers where they're at today.

Okay. And then on MaintainXO, moving downstream in operations and connecting the asset lifecycle, there's other vendors that have also put these pieces together. I think there's maybe been a range of successes and maybe the pieces end up functioning separately, but there's just not good cross-pollination and kind of upstream design ends up working, but it doesn't connect downstream. How does Autodesk maybe think about tackling this proposition differently than it's been tackled before?

Certainly, we're aware of all those other explorations in this space. One of the things I want to make sure that you understand here is it's not just about the maintenance piece and what we're acquiring today. It's about the whole experience around how a digital twin actually operates for our customers in their real-world settings. So we're actually building out capabilities that circle a whole bunch of the problem, and I gave some of those examples in the factory space. But also when you look at some of these other solutions and why MaintainX has managed to grow so fast, a lot of these older solutions required custom solutions. They were dependent on other platforms like Salesforce, for instance, and they were narrowly focused on an ecosystem of vendors that were supported by the particular players. MaintainX is a complete heterogeneous solution. Every asset that the customer has to manage can be managed within an environment like MaintainX, which I think is a very important differentiator as we move here. But you combine that also with what we're trying to do with the end-to-end, where you're defining the twin, you're running things in the twin, and you're moving into optimizing and predictive workflows. It's something that other vendors have not done and have not been able to do successfully. And, again, the reason MaintainX has been successful as it is in consolidating the space is because they craft the code on how to drive some of these solutions in and out of scale.

I just add there is, you know, you can see the evidence of these differentiators that Andrew talked about in the growth profile of MaintainX compared to the growth profiles of some of those other companies.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Wong with Oppenheimer.

fantastic thanks for taking my question uh this first one for you janesh i just wanted to kind of clarify the billings guide uh constant currency billings growth was raised a bit at the low end but the con but the constant currency adjusted for transaction model was unchanged is that just rounding error and the underlying confidence of billings is higher or are you trying to say it's

it's neutral. Yeah, I think that's just largely rounding. You know, we, because we guide in whole percentages, we focused on the total dollars of billings. We didn't see any big shift in terms of the impact of the new transaction model. I think that's just largely rounding right there.

Got it. And then, Andrew, just on the go-to-market changes, It sounds like kind of within the range of outcomes, would you say it's just kind of typical learning curve stuff? Or I remember last year there was maybe some invoicing and billing dynamics that you guys had to iron out those kinks. Like, are there any notable items that you guys feel you need to course correct?

No, nothing we didn't plan for in the cycle. When you move sales incentives around and move sales roles around, you're obviously going to go through a cycle of absorbing those changes and absorbing those things into your pipeline. You're going to go through some pipeline disruption and all the things associated with that. These are things we factored in. So, we're not seeing anything we didn't expect like we discussed during the new transaction model change. It's all kinds of things we baked into the cycle and into the change management.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Tern with Wells Fargo.

Hey, great. Thanks. Good afternoon. I appreciate you taking the question. As you're obviously well aware, the company's worked through a fairly notable and impressive transformation over the past few years. Maybe just a two-part question for me. You could just provide us with kind of a grounding update on where the company stands in terms of technology re-platforming and evolution of the pricing model and how that positions the company competitively from your perspective. And then as the follow-on, just maybe also speak to confidence in layering MaintainX into that, just confidence in the foundation you've set as this being the right point to kind of bring something new into the fold there. Thanks very much.

Yeah, Michael, that's a really relevant question. So as you know, we've made a lot of investments in kind of changing the company and preparing it for the future at various levels. One of the things we've also did very early on is we prepared for a mixed blended world of subscription and consumption. It's one of the things I think we're well ahead of a lot of other companies in the application space. So we already have offerings that allow us to provide subscriptions for people that are heavy users, blended consumption models like Flex for people that are occasional users. And we also have ways and means of which to blend these things together. We have capacity models, project-based pricing models. So we have a lot of various models that allow us to meet the customer at the project level and also meet them at the usage of AI in ways that maybe other players in the space don't. which I think is really important. And we built the systems and processes up around that. We've also built the systems and processes that allow us to bring in acquisitions and integrate them into our processes more effectively. Now, MaintainX is a subscription model and they're moving into the consumption space moving forward. So they're a natural fit for some of the capabilities that we already have. So we feel pretty, very confident about how we can integrate them and move them into our processes. But we've come quite a ways up in the maturity curve and And we feel pretty good about where we are with regards to being ready for the new world in terms of some of the pricing models and the packaging models that are associated with that.

Thanks very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Joshua Tilton with Wolf Research.

Thanks for sneaking in.

Yeah, we can, Josh.

Hey, guys. Can you hear me?

We can now. Go ahead, please. Ah, perfect.

A bit of an awkward pause there for a second. Maybe just two quick ones for me. First one is just something we noticed is, you know, there was a rebranding or repackaging of Autodesk built on the eStore to form a build. And along with that, it feels like the pricing of that offering is, I don't know if significantly is the right word, but mid-teens cheaper than it was previously. Is there any change in the strategy that you guys are seeing in construction around, you know, how you're using price as a lever to entice customers, especially since the offering itself is is pretty good and and then i have a follow-up for that

yeah so you're actually convolving two things there michael so let me uh um i mean joshua sorry uh let me let me help you with that a little bit so the rebranding of everything under forma is to acknowledge that we have an end-to-end solution that's entirely cloud native from design pre-construction planning all the way into construction so everything is branded under the form a layer so former for construction is now connected to directly through through form of data management to form a design site design and form a building design the offering you're talking about is form of build essentials build essentials is a version of build design to reach the small and mid-sized general contractors so it's a effort to expand our footprint down market at a price point and a capability point that works so it's essentially a smaller version of artist build that fits for the people who are participating in the in the in the project more broadly that's what that price point is it's basically going to expand our footprint and our reach into the entire ecosystem and it's designed to actually accelerate some of our expansion into other parts of the

construction process it makes makes a lot of sense um maybe just just one more and i'm going to preface this with we have a ton of prints tonight i've been bouncing around on call so if it's been just been addressed already i apologize but um if i if i step back uh you know you guys just put out uh a really solid quarter i don't think i've gotten anybody really picking at the results themselves but then we also have this this deal that you're announcing coming into the fold and it's pretty sizable and i think if there's one piece of feedback that i've been getting since results dropped it's just you know elsewhere in in in our coverage or in our software space where companies have tried to layer in some pretty sizable m&a recently uh you know it's been for it it hasn't exactly gone well is there anything that you can maybe you know give us or communicate to us that can increase the confidence that now the right time to make this acquisition uh that the core business is still healthy and nothing has changed there uh and that like you know and And that this is, you know, the right time to be making a deal of this size, if that makes sense.

So we're a very disciplined company when it comes to acquisitions. And I want to I want to go back to what we did with construction, because, again, we're running a very similar playbook that we do with construction. And frankly, over a five year period, a lot of the pricing dynamics and all the operating dynamics are actually very similar when you adjust for the five year difference in time frame. So we're super disciplined about these things. We do work like this when we know we can absorb it and we know we can execute on it. The timing's right because this is the time when you want to expand the breadth and depth of your data and context layer across entire life cycles. The broader and deeper your context and data layer, the more competitive you are in the future agentic world because the more workflows you can automate, the more value you can bring to your customers. So the timing is right for us, super disciplined about processes like this, and we've been waiting to do this and planning to do this for quite some time.

John, the only thing I would add in terms of thinking about this versus the broader Autodesk business is keep in mind that at the time of close, MaintainX will still be a very small percentage of Autodesk overall, so it's not going to be enough to influence the overall core business growth rates in a meaningful way in the initial stages. And then just to help you understand how the MaintainX business is performing, we will give you appropriate information to understand that. So in the early quarters, we'll give you good information on that so you can understand how it's contributing to Autodesk. But just given how small it is as a percentage overall, I would not assume a permanent standalone quarterly reporting framework on it, but we will certainly be transparent in the early quarters as we bring it into the company.

Super helpful, guys. And again, a great quarter. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tyler Radke with Citi.

Yeah, thank you for taking the question. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can.

Okay, great. Andrew, I'm curious, as you talk with your big EBA customers, what is sort of their appetite to allow Autodesk to use their data, you know, in terms of AI? And how have those conversations evolved, particularly considering the, you know, exciting roadmap and all the innovation you're doing?

Yeah, you know, our relationship with our customers is one of transparency and choice. We are very transparent about what we're doing with their data and how we're using it and where we're using it and where we're going to give them choice for opting out of how we use their data. That relationship has been highly effective. It's resulted in robust conversations with a lot of customers, and I think it's resulted in good outcomes for them and for us. Everybody wants the automations we're able to deliver. A lot of customers realize that they can't deliver some of the things that they really need at the scale that they're at. So as long as we continue to lean into transparency, be very straightforward with our customers and direct about what we're doing and what we're not doing and offering some level of choice, we've been having a very productive relationship with all of these customers and really good discussions.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Clark Jeffries with Piper Sandler.

Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to follow up on the discussion about MaintainX kind of graduating from subscription to subscription plus consumption. Maybe you could preview for us what that might look like for that business model. How far along are they? Is it meaningfully contributing to the growth rate? And then a follow up, just, you know, a lot of Autodesk's focus has been on the, you know, the AEC segment and the manufacturing segment. And I think there's really an opportunity with MaintainX to expand to a lot more owner-operator presence. And so after spanning from manufacturing to a lot of those other industries that you mentioned in terms of critical infrastructure or commercial real estate, do you see a investment in go-to-market that will happen to make this asset extend into some of those other verticals, beef up the sales force to kind of grow owner-operator presence? Thank you.

Yeah. First off, it's far too early to look at maintain X through the lens of consumption and things associated with consumption. They're very early in that journey. They've got a bunch of AI driven capabilities, that will evolve over time. Now, with regards to the larger question about branching out to those other segments, again, following very much what we did in construction, we built an entire go-to-market machinery around construction that allowed us to reach various players within the construction ecosystem. That's why we pull it out separately, and that's why we engage the way we do to make these businesses successful, is that we want to make sure we're building the ecosystem, not just the product ecosystem, but the go-to-market ecosystem that allows us to reach the various customers. You heard us kind of talk pretty vocally about the first pillar being probably in the product manufacturing space, but remember, we already have a footprint in what are operations, and we already have a footprint in building operations as well. Our desire is absolutely to get deeper into the owner-operator workflow because we feel that's converging them and bringing them in closer to the entire process is going to be valuable to us, valuable to them, and valuable to the rest of our customers in our ecosystem.

Thank you very much. Thank you. That is all the time we have for Q&A today. I would like to hand the call back over to Vice President Investor Relations, Simon May Smith, for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Andrew, and good to speak to everyone. We'll look forward to chatting to many of you on the road over the coming weeks. If you have follow-up questions, please ping me or my team, and we'll look forward to chatting on our next quarter's earnings. Thanks very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating. This does conclude today's program, and you may now disconnect.