2 weeks Ago
Interior of the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco, CA. Autodesk is a global leader in design, engineering, and entertainment software, empowers industries from architecture and manufacturing to media and entertainment, with solutions aimed at fostering creativity and productivity. The company’s CIO for the past seven years, Prakash Kota, is excited about the transformative role AI is set to play in the company and among the customers it serves.
“Autodesk’s mission is about designing a better world, and AI will be critical to automating and enhancing insights for our customers,” he stated. Since joining the company nearly 20 years ago when Autodesk’s annual revenue was just $600 million, Kota has seen Autodesk grow to over $6 billion in revenue today. Now, as it sets its sights on $10 billion, the need for scalable AI applications is urgent.
As AI becomes integral to business strategy, Autodesk is transitioning from experimental phases into a full production environment, tackling AI’s transformative potential with meticulous planning and cross-functional alignment. “This isn’t just about tech—it’s about people, processes, and ensuring everyone is ready to make the leap from concept to scale,” said Prakash Kota, CIO of Autodesk. For him, implementing AI at scale requires more than just the right technology; it needs careful change management to bring employees along the journey, embedding new ways of working while enabling adaptability to evolving roles.
Balancing Buy and Build to Enhance Productivity At Autodesk, Kota has established a balanced approach to AI, blending both off-the-shelf and tailored solutions. “Our bias leans towards buying whenever possible,” he explained, “but with each use case, we evaluate what fits best.” Autodesk leverages products from established vendors, supplemented with niche tools from startups, for applications like internal search and chatbot capabilities.
When needed, Autodesk tweaks these tools to meet specific requirements but prefers not to commit to any one large language model (LLM). “For every use case, we experiment with different models, choosing what makes the best sense in practice,” Kota noted, ensuring flexibility and relevance across applications. Autodesk CIO Prakash Kota Kota highlights that this balance is especially important as Autodesk scales, helping to prevent AI-related spending from spiraling.
“In the cloud, if you don’t actively manage, spend can escalate,” he warned, underscoring Autodesk’s focus on value rather than volume. They favor consumption-based pricing models, which help maintain cost efficiency by avoiding “shelfware.” “We’re aiming for usage rates around 80-90%, not 20-30%,” he said.
This cautious approach reflects a broader ethos within Autodesk, where the focus is on increasing both efficiency and effectiveness. Trump Vs. Harris 2024 Polls: Final Forecasts End In A Virtual Tie As Harris Closes Gap Samsung’s Update Decision—Bad News For Millions Of Galaxy S24 And S23 Owners Election 2024 Swing State Polls: Trump-Harris Race Deadlocked On Election Eve—As Pennsylvania Still Tied (Updated) Championing New Ways of Working AI’s has driven new ways of working across Autodesk’s roles as different as Finance, Marketing and Customer Support.
But Kota cautions that scaling requires more than a handful of enthusiasts. “Around 20% will dive in headfirst, but we also need to engage the other 80%,” he underscored. Gamification and peer recognition play a key role in driving adoption, alongside a structured approach to skills development.
Employees can complete AI learning paths at their own pace, and Autodesk uses badges and metrics to track engagement and reward participation. Central to Autodesk’s success has been a shift in goals and incentives aligned with AI-driven changes. For instance, customer support agents now use AI-assisted responses to handle multiple chats simultaneously, effectively doubling productivity without compromising customer satisfaction.
“This is about new rules and expectations,” said Kota, “where efficiency means not just speed, but effectiveness.” By altering the benchmarks reflective of the new expectation that agents will handle multiple chats concurrently, Autodesk has transformed both the goals and the associated behaviors, setting a new baseline for productivity. Creating a Culture of Co-Creation and Governance Building an AI-powered enterprise requires collaboration across multiple teams to establish foundational trust in AI’s impact and transparency in its deployment.
Autodesk’s Center of Excellence supports this by setting guidelines around privacy, security and other core principles, which are integrated into every AI initiative. “We didn’t want a traditional steering committee,” Kota explained, “but rather a framework to encourage co-creation.” Teams from Product, HR, Legal, and Security work in unison, focusing on aligning technology use with company mission and values rather than developing technology for its own sake.
A practical outcome of this governance structure has been the I2I (Idea to Implementation) framework, which encourages employees to pitch ideas based on expected outcomes, rather than diving into the technology first. “As a software company, it’s easy to get captivated by cool tech, but we guard against that by staying outcomes-focused,” Kota explained. This approach, he noted, is a direct lesson from Autodesk’s early cloud journey, where agility led to explosive cloud costs until guidelines were introduced to manage them.
The I2I framework, similarly, aims to keep AI use cases aligned with specific business objectives, minimizing the risk of aimless innovation. Autodesk’s AI Explorer Site and the Future of AI in Design To further accelerate AI learning, Autodesk has launched an AI Explorer site, which hosts use cases, best practices and learning materials tailored for different personas within the company. “It’s about tailoring AI to each function, from Finance to Marketing, with variations based on what makes sense for them,” Kota said.
The AI Explorer is a self-paced learning resource, offering modular content and access to essential AI tools and use cases, all in preparation for a company-wide push ahead of the holiday season. Kota is quick to underscore that Autodesk’s focus on AI is not driven by cost-cutting but by the potential to increase productivity and enhance the employee experience. “From the CEO down, it’s never been about reducing costs,” he emphasized.
Instead, AI is viewed as a means to “augment what employees do, to let them focus on more meaningful work.” This focus on employee experience is particularly resonant in Autodesk’s Silicon Valley headquarters, where the excitement around AI has fueled a rapid but disciplined deployment of these capabilities. As Autodesk scales, AI is set to become an increasingly visible part of daily workflows, with tools like GitHub Copilot gradually integrating into engineers' toolkits.
“We’re already seeing a big shift in productivity and quality,” Kota observed, adding that GitHub Copilot adoption has risen from single digits to nearly 40% acceptance in production. As employees grow more comfortable with AI, Autodesk expects this number to rise, setting a new standard for productivity and effectiveness in the digital workplace. Conclusion: AI Becomes Part of Autodesk’s DNA For Autodesk, AI has moved from playground to production, transforming operations and workflows in meaningful ways.
The company’s strategic blend of bought and built solutions, alongside careful attention to governance, ensures that AI capabilities are well-aligned with Autodesk’s growth trajectory. As Kota summed it up, “The goal is to change the DNA of our operating model. AI isn’t just something we’re adding—it’s becoming part of who we are as a company.
” With this approach, Autodesk is well-positioned to drive not just efficiency but a new era of creativity and effectiveness in digital design. Peter High is President of Metis Strategy , a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble .
He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh ..
