(upbeat music)
- So welcome to "Conversations with Leaders."
I'm Wesley Story. I'm an enterprise strategist at AWS.
Today, I'm joined with Amy,
and I'd like you to introduce yourself a little bit, Amy,
'cause I don't wanna take that from the audience.
And I'd love you to tell me about your role at Autodesk.
And give me a little background if you would.
- Great, so I'm Amy Bunszel obviously,
and I'm the executive vice president
of our Architecture, Engineering, & Construction
design solutions tools.
And so what my team does is we build software
for people in the AEC industry,
working on everything from roads, bridges,
highways, water infrastructure, stadiums,
pretty much everything in the built environment.
- Wow, that's a lot. That's a lot.
- It's a lot of fun.
- Yeah, I had no idea that you have
such a massive scope, quite frankly.
So how do you balance all that?
- Well, I have a really great team working for me.
So I spend most of my time thinking about the broader
strategic longer-term aspects of what we're trying to do,
and also with customers.
it's super exciting to visit our customers.
- So Amy, as a leader, you've talked a lot
about being an innovator and risk-taker at heart.
However, as you know, sometimes risk-taking can be risky.
(both laugh)
So tell me a little bit about how you actually
came up with that leadership style
and what it means to your business.
- So for me, risk isn't about being reckless.
It's about really thinking about innovation
and exploration and experimentation,
and really thinking about different ways
to try to learn and develop.
And so I find that if we are open to the experimentation
and we're thinking about what our outcomes are gonna be,
and if we're not hitting them,
then it's a matter of just reorienting.
So it's not about taking a risk that's so big, you know,
you're gonna put the company at risk
or a team or a product at risk.
But it's really about taking the kind of risks
that you can learn from and then build upon
as you go forward.
- You know, one thing I run into with some customers,
especially those that wanna emulate this whole
technology industry thing of failing fast, right,
is culture, and how do you create that culture
where failure feels safe for people?
And also, if I can add this one more thing,
because of your industry, you might relate to this,
is some industries feel like failure is not an option,
like it's an evil thing.
Tell me a little bit about how you've created
that culture that makes that okay.
- It's an interesting thing, and it's changed over the years
for me because I think seven or eight years ago,
there was this whole fail fast,
and as leaders, we're like, it's okay to fail.
And my team would be looking at me
like I was a crazy person.
'Cause we wakes up in the morning thinking I'm gonna fail?
You know, you got a bunch of A-players,
people really excited about what they're doing,
and you're telling them that they should fail.
So we've kind of moved away from that language,
and we talk more about experimentation.
So again, it's about giving people the freedom
to go and explore something,
but also having expected outcomes, so you know, all right,
we tried this, we were hoping this would happen.
It didn't happen. We learned this, so we're gonna stop now.
- So Amy, Autodesk has sustainability
as a corporate imperative.
And I imagine it shows up in lots of different ways,
from how you guys think about products
to how you run your business.
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
- Absolutely, so yes, as a company, we're carbon neutral,
we are doing all of the important things
that companies do in that space.
But I think more importantly, the impact we can have
with our customers and helping them achieve more sustainable
and resilient outcomes is really where we're different
from a lot of other companies.
We've been talking about sustainability for far more
than 10 years, before it was fashionable to talk about.
And what's interesting with our products
is we help customers really reduce carbon,
create more resilient buildings, lightweight things
so they're easier to ship around the world.
There's just a whole lot of positive outcomes
that we can help deliver.
And we have a couple key initiatives.
One is around total carbon.
So more and more these days, people are realizing
it's not just the air conditioners and the heating systems
that contributes to the carbon in a building.
It's all of the materials you chose
to build that building with,
and how far did they come to get to the building?
That's really called embodied carbon.
And then there's this thing called operating carbon.
And so the built environment contributes the most
to greenhouse gases of anything, any producer at all.
So we're really partnering up with our customers to try
to figure out how we can build more sustainable buildings.
- Is there a lesson you've learned
to keeping sustainability front and center?
- You know, it's interesting.
It has to really be, it's also good for business.
That's really the- - Tell me more.
- When it was just, you know, I think there was a time
where people felt sustainability was just there
to tick a box and make people feel good.
But really it's good for business,
and it's good for the planet.
I think a good example is we look
at building product manufacturers and people that provide
all the concrete, drywall, things for buildings.
These days, architects and owners are choosing suppliers
based on how green they are.
So if you're ignoring that, you're not gonna be selected.
But if you're delivering 25% less carbon emissions
than the person down the road, you're gonna get selected
to have your materials leveraged in that project.
So that's real.
- So when thinking about product strategy,
how does sustainability influence
how your team approaches it?
- So it all kind of goes back to the customer
and what customer problems are we trying to solve?
What outcomes are we trying to help them deliver?
And so these days, carbon's a big deal,
but some of the other items that are really important
is on the other end of the life cycle
is operating the building or the facility.
And so we've been hearing a lot from customers
that they would like to adopt some of the kind of
manufacturing practices with digital twins
into the building space.
And so we're working with them to figure out
how we can help them operate better and save money
and use less resources on that side of things.
- Tell me more about that.
That's something I get the chance
to talk to a lot of customers about,
but everyone might not fully understand what it is.
So could you first start with what is a digital twin?
- So a digital twin is effectively
a digital representation of a physical thing.
So it could be anything from a, you know,
it could be a simple Excel spreadsheet
that sort of has all the parameters you need
for your physical object,
or it could be a full-on three-dimensional model
of a building connected up to sensors
that tell you how hot is it in the building,
where are the people in the building,
are these conference rooms utilized very often?
All kinds of information that you'd get
off of sensors as well, all of this put together
in a visual representation so that you can do things like
predictive maintenance, renovations, optimizations,
really to drive the most efficient and effective spaces.
- So a virtual representation of the physical something
or entity, if you will, and it sounds like lots of data.
And my favorite thing about data
is when you put it to action.
So you started to allude to that, but what are some
of the other things you can do to put this data into action?
- So you can definitely drive a lot of insights out of that.
And you might be wanting to figure out
how to configure a space for, you know,
maybe you have underutilized areas of your facility
and you don't know why, so you can actually play around
with reconfiguring it in different ways,
and then watch the traffic
and see how the utilization might change.
And that in turn might inform your next project
where you might be making different decisions
about how you use the space.
- So it's being able to sense and respond
to different external factors and predicting outcomes
and also making these automatic or autonomous decisions?
- Yep. - Is that something
you're seeing as well? - Yes, it is.
In particular, 'cause they're operating
large-scale facilities, even if you were to think
of like a hospital, for example,
and understanding all of the different componentry,
equipment in there, and like how often
does it need to be refreshed?
Do you have it on order?
Is it a critical piece of equipment that might
be ready to fail, do you have a backup?
All these things can be planned en masse,
like on hundreds of facilities.
So it's not the sort of bespoke labor of a manual operation.
It really can be done at scale quite broadly.
- So when considering digital twins,
and all the vast amounts of data that comes
from digital twins, or actually supports them rather,
some of the problems that some companies run into
is how do you actually manage all this data?
How do you manage it from a technical perspective,
but let's not worry about that yet.
Let's worry about the nontechnical executives.
What do you recommend to them when you think about
how you organize around it, how you actually get analytics
and insights out of it?
What are some insights and thoughts you have there?
- So the most successful ways
we've seen people start is with a pilot.
Thinking about either a particular facility
or a particular aspect of that facility,
and then trying to understand, what is something
that they wish they can drive as an outcome?
And then it's a matter of,
let's just look for the data that supports that use case.
And so you break it down so that you can build
a cross-functional team that can then work together on this.
And then once you have success there,
you can find another challenge and another challenge.
So you don't open it up and try to do everything
all at once. - Don't boil the ocean.
- Yeah. - Yes.
So you probably won't be surprised at this,
but I still run into a lot of companies that say
we gotta build a data lake.
And the first thing I ask them is, why?
Like, what are you trying to solve for?
And I think the same lesson is applied there as well
is start with your insights.
Start with what are the problems we're trying to solve,
what are the use cases, or in Amazonian speak,
we like to work backwards
from customer outcomes or problems.
And I think that's a lesson that we all
need to kind of take heed to, right?
- Yes, well, and also, you will find out
you don't have all the data that you want.
You have too much data that you're not using,
but then you might be missing a key piece of data
that you need to figure out how to go get.
And that in itself is a big key learning.
- So Amy, you guys have had a pretty big acquisition.
Can you tell me a little bit about that
and what they do and what's behind it?
- Absolutely, we did our first billion-dollar acquisition,
which my team drove, and that was really exciting,
as you can imagine.
And we acquired a company called Innovyze.
And Innovyze builds software that does design
of water systems and also digital twins
for water ecosystems.
So what an amazing time to be working in water.
It's such an important and vital resource,
and there's just so much work happening around the globe
to fix problems and create opportunities for people
in terms of how they get their water supply.
- That sounds like a massive undertaking,
not just the acquisition,
but the mission of the business itself.
- Yeah, the mission of the business was very exciting for us
'cause it very much aligns to really our core values
and areas that we were working in already.
But by buying Innovyze, we connect that
to the Autodesk portfolio, we really have an end-to-end
solution for water now.
So the two companies together, there was almost no overlap
in what we were doing, so we're really coming to market
with an incredibly strong story.
- And it's also an applied example of like digital twin
in a specific industry that has a meaningful outcome.
- It's a great example of modernization, too.
So a lot of the digitization that needs to happen
is in a lot of these water municipalities.
There's just a lot of aging infrastructure there,
and real opportunities to make an impact
on less water lost in systems
and delivering better experiences for everyone.
- And I think water is something that we can all relate to
'cause we all need it, right?
It's such a critical resource that has lots of shortages
or all kind of other issues in the world.
But you mentioned that our infrastructure,
even the United States, is older than people might think.
So if you wire that up, it gives you tremendous insights.
- Right? - It does, 'cause you can
identify in advance where you might have problems,
do maintenance in advance of problems.
And if you think about, an example I like to use
is you're driving down the street,
there's a sinkhole in your neighborhood,
and all of the utility trucks and everyone else is there.
Oftentimes that's 'cause there was an undetected leak
that went on for a long period of time.
And when they finally realized it, it was, you know,
very, very, very severe.
Whereas with things like digital twins for water,
you can identify these problems when they're tiny problems
and get in and address them before they become big problems.
- That's tangible impact. - Mm-hmm. It is.
- Kudos to you and the team on that.
- Oh, thank you.
- Can you tell me a little bit more about how you guys
were able to drive innovation in ways
that you might not have otherwise been able to
due to the things you get from the cloud?
- Yes, the notion of a single coordinated model
that is accessible to everyone working on a project,
is it just drives so much productivity.
And I'll tell you, that's because in the past,
people would have their own copies of these things, right?
You'd have maybe three firms working on something,
you'd have your copy, I'd have my copy.
How are we sure that we were all working off of the same,
most up-to-date information?
How did we communicate? That would be on like paper.
Still, even today.
So by centralizing all of this, people are able to work
much more dynamically.
They're able to actually build on each other's ideas
and collaborate in real time by leveraging the cloud.
It also makes it easier to onboard new stakeholders
and to leverage the data throughout the whole design
through construction process.
And really it used to be stacks and stacks and stacks
of drawings, and it still is in some cases.
And things get built in the wrong place
and have to be torn up because people aren't working
off the same coordinated information.
- So iteration and innovation, is that at play also?
Does that help? - It does.
- You have an acceleration? - It does, because you know,
it's not just about putting the data in the cloud.
It's, okay, now that it's here,
how do we make it more valuable?
- That's right, so overall, Amy, if you think to the future,
you know, fast forward however many years
you wanna think about, are there any words of wisdom
or advice that you'd give to other leaders
as they're contemplating all this?
- So when I think of the future, the first word
that actually popped into my head was uncertainty,
because I never could've predicted the last two years.
But I think many of us thrived through this period
of constant change in the last two years.
And for me, I think as leaders,
if we learn to embrace uncertainty,
but also help our employees, you know,
have empathy for the employees,
help them do their best work
while they're navigating through the uncertainty,
and be open and take risks in the right places,
I think, I mean, we're accelerating so many things
that I don't think we thought we were going to.
- So Amy, thank you so much for your time today.
It's often a privilege to be able to sit with people
like yourself who have such accomplished organizations
and great successes, so it's great for us
to be able to celebrate those successes with you.
Congratulations to the work you guys have done at Autodesk.
And thanks so much for your investment of time today.
- Well, thank you, too. I really appreciate the opportunity.