Autodesk University 2026, Day 1
Day 1.
Here we go.
Welcome back to Arrakis.
Day one is the classic Fast & Furious day. For anyone coming from EMEA, it probably means waking up at 3:00 a.m. and then going through the whole day half awake, half asleep. But as an Autodesk employee working in product at Tandem, the first thing on day 1 for me also meant the KEYNOTE. As many of you know, Tandem started as an incubation product; one day I will write more about that here, maybe? But for many years, we did not have a space in the keynote. Last year, live keynotes started, and we had our first big-stage appearance. This year was our second one, now as Autodesk Operations. Today there is more on that and a roadmap session where you can see what I have been busy with over the last few months. It has to do with ontologies, tabular data, AI and 2D for digital twins. But anyhow, I am deviating from the main subject. The Tandem demo had a moment, and the moment showed clearly that our demo was live. My team, Tim and Sarah, managed it like absolute champs in front of a big audience; I could never pull that off.
Demoing Tandem has been a challenge since day 1. I remember how it took months to show live data to the public, even though the capabilities were there, because no one wants to show live data from their building, obviously, because it is private. To show live facilities meant that we had to, most of the time, use our own Autodesk buildings, and even so, it keeps being a challenge. Of course, we can use synthetic data, but then it is synthetic, and if you know about sensors, you will know.
In the Autodesk Operations booth, we are demoing a facility based in the UK, so when people come at a certain time, the sensor data looks boring. So yeah, live, real-world AI is a fun thing to deal with 🙂
After keynote, I continued booth duty. As I said, my time at AU is about meeting customers, and chatting with folks from all sorts of backgrounds shows how the built environment is such an extensive industry. Then I did research sessions with customers. This year, I hosted a roundtable of Tandem power users talking about their journey and challenges. The industry challenges in the operational world are very similar to the AEC phases, with the addition that, in my view, it is even more fragmented.
Then my day continued with catching up with folks I kept meeting and welcoming some of our new MaintainX friends. I still have seen many of you so I hope to catch many more in the next two days!
From the tooling out there, I was able to spend 3 minutes in Endra, but I need to go back to investigate more because that looks nice, and I cannot help myself but get my hands on every AEC Tech product out there. I am hoping to see more of them today!
Day 1 done, Day 2 here we come.
Picture looks different than the big hall because Autodesk employees tend to be moved to other areas as the main stage gets full.
