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The AI infrastructure boom is boosting the business of Autodesk, a digital design software company, despite broader investor concerns about the technology. Mark Maurer writes for today’s Morning Ledger newsletter:
Tech giants’ massive spending on developing facilities for training and running AI models have helped raise demand for Autodesk’s software. But Autodesk is also one of many software companies facing a selloff in their stocks amid investor fears that new developments in AI will supplant existing tools. The company’s stock is down 21% so far this year. Autodesk said it is confident in its competitive edge.
Chief Financial Officer Janesh Moorjani talked with the WSJ Leadership Institute about AI spending, the benefit of data-center buildouts, and navigating layoffs. Edited excerpts follow.
Autodesk said in January it planned to lay off about 7% of its workplace globally. Were the cuts related to AI?
It is distinct from the integration of AI in the sense that this was the final piece of a two-year program that we had. We also did layoffs in February of 2025. At that time, we said that we would reinvest some of those dollars to build tools and capabilities in the business that would allow us to complete the optimization. What you saw us announce in January was really the completion of that optimization.
Separate from that, we also have completely modernized the technology stack. We made investments in the business to support go-to-market. We replaced some of our legacy internal technology capabilities with much more modern SaaS-based tools and capabilities. We are using AI tools in order to be able to do that.
The continued buildout of AI data centers work has helped lift Autodesk’s revenue, which climbed 19% in the fourth quarter from the same period a year earlier. How significant is the benefit?
We're highly diversified across industry segments, geographies and customer sizes. Within the construction industry, the fundamental problem that our customers are facing is actually lack of capacity and productivity challenges. As you have strength in data-center buildouts, that capacity has shifted from some other parts of the industry to focus on these data-center buildouts. That's been a great tailwind for us for a few quarters now. But because there’s a capacity limitation in the industry, that capacity is coming out of somewhere else. We're benefiting either way from strong construction tailwinds, regardless of whether it’s data centers or other forms of buildouts including infrastructure. We feel very well positioned.
Autodesk in February invested $200 million earlier this month in World Labs, a physical-AI company. How do you think about AI investments?
Where there's a lot of investment in the industry flowing into AI right now, bigger models, centralized platforms, hyper-scale infrastructure—and candidly there's a lot of hype in the marketplace as well. Our view is that AI needs to be human-centered by design, and grounded in real-world outcomes, because AI for the physical and built world is very different than the probabilistic outcomes you could get from language models. Almost good enough is not good enough when you're dealing with the precision in the industries in which we operate.
—Mark Maurer
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