Nashville, TN — At AU 2025, the spotlight turned squarely to architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO). With Autodesk executives and customers on stage, the message was clear: the industry’s first end-to-end AI-native cloud platform is no longer theoretical—it’s here in the form of Autodesk Forma.
Over the course of an hour-long keynote, Amy Bunzel, Executive Vice President of AEC Design Solutions and her colleagues outlined how Forma is being expanded to cover the entire project lifecycle, from planning through operations. Customers including Stantec and Dura Vermeer demonstrated the platform in action, underscoring its potential to change not just how projects are delivered but how the AECO industry organizes its work.
“This is the first time anyone has delivered a full lifecycle platform for AECO,” Amy told the assembled users. “Forma is AI-native, cloud-based and spans planning, detailed design, construction and operations. Yes, it’s a big deal.”
From ACC to Forma: A Unified Cloud
Amy told of Autodesk’s reach, of a civil engineer who used Autodesk products in Croatia as she went from the new Zagreb airport to the Pelješac Bridge on a recent vacation. It set up her core theme: Autodesk tools underpin projects all over the world.
The Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) has been fully merged into Forma, making it the backbone for design, construction and operational workflows. Autodesk Docs—already central to collaboration—has been rebranded as Forma Data Management, officially designated as the common data environment (CDE) for the entire platform.
Every Autodesk customer on subscription—including users of AutoCAD, Revit and Civil 3D—will gain access to Forma Data Management Essentials at no extra cost, providing an “on-ramp” to the new ecosystem.
The next major step: Revit as the first Forma-connected client. Through granular data sharing and AI-powered Forma features, Revit users will gain access to cloud-native capabilities without leaving the desktop.
Planning: High-Impact Decisions Early
Nicolas Mangon, Autodesk’s VP of AEC Strategy, framed planning as “the most strategic phase” of the lifecycle. With Forma, early decisions can now be backed by real-world context and AI-powered insights, from solar analysis to wind simulations.
Stantec and Dubai’s First Cancer Hospital
Mangon introduced Stantec’s design of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Cancer Hospital in Dubai. With extreme climate conditions and ambitious sustainability goals, Stantec needed fast, data-driven decisions.
Forma’s solar shading and microclimate analysis helped teams across 12 offices and time zones evaluate façade twists inspired by the desert’s ghaf tree, optimize healing gardens and test wind flow.
“Forma allowed us to make decisions more quickly. It gave us the leap in speed we needed to be more imaginative,” Stantec’s team said.
Expanding Forma with Extensions
Autodesk announced several Forma extensions:
- Esri ArcGIS: Richer site and environmental data.
- FenestraPro: High-performance façade analysis.
- Dynamo Cloud + Finch: Generative floor plans and one-click Revit integration.
- Infraspace: AI-driven road and street planning.
- Podium: Automated data center planning with utility, cooling and rack configurations.
Each extension embeds domain expertise directly into Forma, letting planners evaluate tradeoffs between carbon, cost and construction time before locking in constraints.
Design: From Augmented to AI-Generated
Racel Amour, Director of Product for AEC Design, took the stage next, describing her vision of “augmented design”—AI as a partner that handles repetitive work while keeping human designers in control.
Autodesk’s 2024 acquisition of PointFuse has been integrated into ReCap Pro, allowing massive point clouds to be converted into segmented meshes. These can now be imported into Revit as families, dramatically accelerating retrofits and renovations.
A new beta promises AI object recognition directly from scans, paving the way for automated extraction of existing conditions across buildings, factories and infrastructure.
Forma Building Design Beta
Racel previewed Forma Building Design, a new module entering closed beta. It combines easy modeling tools, generative AI and real-time carbon/daylight analysis for detailed design.
Key features:
- Continuous monitoring of indoor daylight, carbon impact and thermal exposure.
- Generative AI interior layouts that auto-regenerate as designs evolve.
- Ability to lock decisions while AI generates new options only in unlocked areas.
- Support for natural language and sketch-driven commands.
“Something that seemed like magic years ago—telling your computer what to do—is now real,” Racel said.
Autodesk Assistant Expands
The Autodesk Assistant is being rolled out across Revit, AutoCAD and Civil 3D. It will automate tasks like compliance checking: scanning drawings against CAD standards, highlighting violations and suggesting fixes.
Civil 3D users will be able to ask Assistant to analyze a model for ADA accessibility violations and receive targeted corrections instantly.
Immersive Review
Autodesk also highlighted Workshop XR, a VR tool launched last year. In one Stantec project, a 120-minute VR session identified over 50 design issues—problems that would otherwise have surfaced during construction.
Construction: Predictive, Not Reactive
Alissa Briggs, Senior Director, Experience Design at Autodesk, described how Autodesk is moving from “reactive” site management to predictive construction.
By connecting BIM data, site activity history and AI insights, Autodesk aims to detect risks before they escalate.
Unified Admin and Preconstruction
A new common administration layer will unify permissions across Forma. In preconstruction, estimators will soon be able to perform takeoff, bidding and qualification in a single environment, always linked to live design data via Forma Data Management.
Bid proposals, estimates and partner profiles will also be unified, with AI-powered cost projections.
Smarter Field Tools
For field crews, Autodesk introduced:
- Faster punch list workflows via Project Home shortcuts.
- Bulk editing of asset details.
- A new model viewer optimized for mobile, even on older devices.
- AI-assisted issue creation: crews snap a photo and the system drafts an issue form.
RFI (Request for Information) workflows are also being rebuilt. Assistant can draft context-rich RFI forms, while Autodesk Bridge will now support RFI data, enabling closed RFIs to be shared across accounts.
Payments and GC Pay
Integration with GC Pay will bring contract and payment workflows directly into Forma, promising clearer audit trails and faster cash flow.
Customer Case: Dura Vermeer
To prove the impact, Amy invited Dura Vermeer, the 170-year-old Dutch contractor, to the stage. CIO Ilse Kools and manager Gert-Jan Ditsel spoke candidly about the importance of trust in their Autodesk partnership.
Kools described the Forma + ACC integration as the backbone of their data strategy: “Scattered data makes decisions hard and AI impossible. A uniform platform ensures standardization and breaks down silos.”
Dura Vermeer uses Forma for urban projects in Amsterdam, testing balcony placement and cycling routes with microclimate simulations—analysis that helped them win a competitive tender.
During the construction of Rotterdam’s Block 333 tower, Forma simulations determined the safest and most efficient tower crane placement, saving days of delay. Another use case: proving rooftop solar arrays would not be compromised by shadows from ventilation equipment, cutting “tons of RFIs and email threads.”
“These tools aren’t just for the office,” Kools said. “They empower field teams to make better decisions and improve safety.”
Operations: Toward Autonomous Buildings
Mangon returned to highlight the fourth phase—operations. With Autodesk Tandem, operational data from IoT sensors and control systems enriches as-built models, giving facility managers insights into asset performance.
The new Tandem Insights module will identify anomalies and blind spots, moving operations from reactive to proactive.
Ultimately, Mangon said, operations will become autonomous, with buildings adjusting energy use, comfort and maintenance like “self-driving cars for facilities.”
A Continuous Lifecycle
In closing, Amy summarized three paradigm shifts Autodesk sees for AECO:
- From files to granular data: always accessible, always current.
- From silos to hyper-collaboration: immersive, real-time and asynchronous.
- From BIM to BIM-plus-outcomes: AI integrated for automation and decision-making.
She called the unification of Forma and ACC into one platform “a milestone moment,” marking the industry’s first comprehensive design-and-make cloud.
“Today’s news might be about Autodesk innovation,” Amy said. “But this moment is not about us. It’s about you—your chance to unlock capacity and do more