Autodesk (NASDAQ:ADSK) Chief Financial Officer Janesh Moorjani said the company’s recent business model changes and planned acquisition of MaintainX are intended to position the design software maker for broader participation across the full asset lifecycle, including operations and artificial intelligence-enabled workflows.
Speaking at a Bank of America conference with Tomer Zilberman, lead analyst of vertical software and back office applications, Moorjani said Autodesk has completed several major transitions in recent years, including moving from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, shifting from upfront billing of total contract value to annual billing on multi-year contracts, and changing the customer buying experience in many markets to a more direct relationship with Autodesk.
Moorjani said the latest of those transitions is largely working through the financial model and should be mostly completed this fiscal year. He said the changes give Autodesk richer information about how customers use its products and support the company’s investments in its platform and industry clouds.
MaintainX Acquisition Expands Autodesk Into Operations
A major focus of the discussion was Autodesk’s announced $3.6 billion acquisition of MaintainX, which Moorjani described as the company’s largest acquisition to date and a logical extension of its historical strengths in planning and design into “make” and now “operate.”
Moorjani said Autodesk historically began as a planning and design company before expanding into construction and Fusion-related manufacturing workflows about seven to eight years ago. MaintainX, he said, helps Autodesk “close the loop” across plan, design, make and operate by giving customers insight into how assets perform after they are built.
He said the operations market represents roughly a $40 billion total addressable market. Moorjani compared Autodesk’s strategy in operations to its approach in construction, where the company made a cornerstone acquisition, followed by organic investment and smaller bolt-on deals. He said Autodesk invested about $1.8 billion of acquisition capital in construction and built a business of about $600 million that is growing north of 20%.
MaintainX brings about 14,000 customers and roughly 10 million assets under management, according to Moorjani. He said the company has collected operational data and workflow context around asset performance, which Autodesk expects to pair with its existing design and construction data.
“When you pair that up with the data and the context that we have on the plan, design, and make space, that allows us to close the full loop,” Moorjani said.
Autodesk Says Core Business Remains Strong
Moorjani rejected the idea that the MaintainX acquisition was prompted by concern about slowing demand in Autodesk’s core design and make markets. He said the underlying business has been resilient across fiscal 2024, 2025 and 2026, supported by secular demand drivers.
He pointed to continued growth opportunities in construction, Fusion, infrastructure and transportation. Moorjani said Autodesk had already discussed its interest in operations about eight months earlier and framed the acquisition as an extension from a position of strength.
Asked about the competitive landscape in operations, Moorjani described the market as highly fragmented, with legacy providers, slower-moving desktop-based vendors and a large amount of white space. He said MaintainX is one of the larger and faster-growing companies among next-generation intelligent maintenance and asset management software providers.
Margin Targets and Capital Allocation Remain Intact
Autodesk plans to raise $2 billion of new debt to help fund the MaintainX acquisition. Moorjani said the company’s capital allocation framework remains unchanged, with the first priority being organic investment, followed by targeted tuck-in acquisitions and continued capital returns.
He reiterated Autodesk’s prior statement that it aims to return approximately 50% of free cash flow, subject to acquisitions, to investors. Moorjani said Autodesk returned a little more than half of free cash flow last year and remains on track to do so again this year.
Moorjani also said MaintainX will be operating margin dilutive because it is a high-growth company still in investment mode. However, he said Autodesk’s fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2029 operating margin goals remain unchanged after the deal closes. He clarified that Autodesk’s stated fiscal 2029 target is 41% non-GAAP operating margin.
AI Strategy Emphasizes Deterministic Outcomes
On artificial intelligence, Moorjani said Autodesk’s advantage is rooted in data, context and expertise. He contrasted Autodesk’s engineering and design requirements with general-purpose frontier AI models, which he said remain probabilistic.
“If there’s 100 people that gave the model the exact same instructions that you give the model, you’d get 100 different answers,” Moorjani said. “That doesn’t work in our world.”
He said Autodesk customers need deterministic outcomes with millimeter-level precision because designs carry safety, cost and liability implications. Moorjani said Autodesk’s models are trained on real-world data from actual customer projects and are paired with deterministic algorithms built into products such as AutoCAD and Revit.
He also said general models often lack the design and construction context needed to understand what is behind a wall, whether a design change conflicts with mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, or whether a field team is working from the latest design.
Moorjani said Autodesk monetizes productivity gains through both subscription pricing and consumption-based pricing. He said consumption-based revenue is about 17% of the business, including roughly 2% from Flex and about 15% from enterprise business agreements. He said Flex could become a larger portion of the business over time, especially with smaller customers or users with burst-capacity needs, but he does not expect it to create near-term revenue volatility.
Quarterly Performance, Demand and Data Centers
Moorjani said Autodesk’s recent quarter “played out quite nicely,” with renewals remaining strong and upfront revenue outperforming expectations. He said about half of the revenue outperformance in the quarter came from upfront license revenue under ASC 606, driven largely by product mix. Autodesk raised full-year guidance by more than the quarterly outperformance, reflecting strength in the underlying business, he said.
On margins, Moorjani said Autodesk does not explicitly guide to gross margin percentage. He said cloud offerings carry lower gross margin percentages than desktop products, but cloud revenue is still expected to be accretive to gross profit dollars. He said those dynamics are embedded in Autodesk’s fiscal 2029 non-GAAP operating margin outlook.
Moorjani also said Autodesk participates in data center build-outs through both the data centers themselves and related infrastructure such as utilities and other supporting projects. He emphasized that Autodesk’s business is diversified across industries, geographies and segments, which helps the company as customer demand shifts among project types.
Asked about construction and architectural indicators, Moorjani said demand has been stable, but cautioned that such indicators are not perfect read-throughs for Autodesk’s business. He said even when some leading indicators softened, Autodesk’s business continued to perform well.
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.
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