Software Trends: Software Takeaways from our 2026 BofA Global Technology Conference

Research evidence excerpt

Software Trends: Software Takeaways from our 2026 BofA Global Technology Conference

Autodesk has now largely completed its transition from upfront multiyear billings to

annual billing on multiyear contracts, while also shifting many international markets to a

more direct transaction model, which gives Autodesk greater visibility into customer

usage and positions the company more effectively for AI, platform monetization, and

future cloud-based workflows. Management noted that the remaining financial noise

from these transitions should largely abate this fiscal year, which would improve

transparency into the underlying growth profile of the business going forward.

The key focus point of the discussion was the $3.6bn acquisition of MaintainX, which

management noted extends its platform from design and make capabilities into operate.

Management highlighted operations as roughly a $40bn TAM and framed the move as a

logical extension of Autodesk’s lifecycle strategy, similar to its earlier expansion into

construction, where roughly $1.8bn of acquisition capital helped build a business now

approaching $600mn and growing north of 20% YoY. We believe the more important

long-term implication is Autodesk’s ability to close the loop across design, build, and

operational workflows, which should deepen its data advantage and strengthen higher-

value AI use cases over time. Management also noted that MaintainX adds roughly

14,000 customers and 10mn assets under management, creating meaningful data and

workflow context that can be paired with Autodesk’s existing design and construction

datasets.

On AI, management pushed back on the view that frontier models are likely to displace

Autodesk’s core design stack, arguing that probabilistic outputs are insufficient in