What happens when AI stops being a future concept and starts becoming part of everyday project workflows? And more importantly, what does that shift look like for the teams building our world today?
I recently attended Autodesk DevCon 2026 in Amsterdam, and one thing was crystal clear: the conversation around AI in construction is no longer theoretical. As an industry, we've moved past asking "if" AI will change the way we build and into figuring out how fast teams can adapt.
DevCon also gave me the opportunity to sit down once again with Ben Cochran, Vice President of Engineering at Autodesk. In our conversation, we unpack the reason attendees continue returning to Devcon every year, the biggest themes emerging from the event, and we explore the growing developer ecosystem shaping the future of design and construction workflows.
We discuss:
Autodesk DevCon started more than a decade ago as a way to bring developers together around Autodesk’s growing cloud-based APIs. Today, it has evolved into one of the company’s biggest gatherings for builders, technologists, and innovators working across design and make industries.
According to Ben, the event began when Autodesk started its ecosystem years ago. “We kicked off a bunch of cloud-based APIs that were really built to extend what we could do with the desktop tools.”
This year’s event in Amsterdam brought together roughly 1,200 attendees focused on learning “what it means to build on Autodesk Platform Services (APS), how to extend that for building out new solutions for our customers.”
For Ben, the biggest draw of DevCon isn’t just the technology announcements. It’s the people in the room.
“One of the reasons why this event is so great and why I love it so much is the community of people who are here,” he shares. Many attendees are developers and technology partners who understand the real-world gaps customers face every day. They use Autodesk Platform Services to build integrations, workflows, and tools that solve highly specific business challenges.
He also notes that Autodesk often learns from the community itself. “When you're building a platform and enabling technology, you have ideas about how that technology can be used, but you don’t know all the opportunities.”
“But developers—they're the ones who understand what that customer needs, and they're the ones who see that business opportunity.”
Ben adds that the feedback loop between Autodesk and the developer community continues to shape how the platform grows and where it goes next.
“Folks get excited about coming back to us and telling us what they do with the platform. I just love that. Every year they come back, and they tell me new things about what they've done. It's great.”
The conversations at DevCon shifted beyond incremental platform updates. A major focus was on how agentic AI will reshape how teams interact with software, data, and workflows across design and construction.
As Ben puts it, “Usually we come, and we talk about the addition to an API or something that can feel incremental sometimes. But with the change in the ecosystem and the change in technology, especially driven by Agentic AI, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of what we can do and what others can do.”
Autodesk Assistant gets smarter with MCP integrations
One of the biggest announcements centered around how industry professionals using Autodesk Assistant will be able to discover and connect to third-party Model Context Protocols (MCPs) in the future, bringing the right tool to the problem they are looking to solve right within their workflow.
According to Ben, developers can now build MCPs that connect Autodesk Assistant to external data sources, systems, and workflows.
“The contributors and builders here who are building MCPs and building technology that connects to other data sources and systems and skills can then bring that into the Autodesk Assistant,” he says.
DevCon also featured announcements around MCPs built on top of Revit and Fusion, expanding how developers can connect Autodesk products with external applications and services.
The Design and Make Marketplace enters the agentic AI era
Another major focus at DevCon 2026 was the Autodesk Design and Make Marketplace - a new destination for AI solutions, integrations, and apps across architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and media and entertainment.
Ben describes the marketplace as a critical piece of the broader AI ecosystem. “This is an opportunity for third parties to put their MCPs in place so the Autodesk Assistant can find those MCPs and understand how to orchestrate and put workflows together.”
A few things make the marketplace especially important moving forward:
That last point is especially interesting. In the future, teams may not need to manually search for the right integration or app. Instead, Autodesk Assistant could surface and invoke the appropriate tool automatically within a workflow.
As Ben explained, “What makes AI in the design and make space really powerful is its connections to system, services, and applications. MCPs provide that.”
If there was one consistent theme across DevCon 2026, it was speed. Not just faster software, but faster decision-making, faster experimentation, and faster paths to better outcomes.
AI is accelerating experimentation
A major shift happening right now is the ability for teams to test more ideas in less time.
Instead of spending weeks validating a workflow, exploring a design option, or troubleshooting a process, teams can iterate much faster. Ben points out that AI is helping people “run more experiments” and “get to better answers faster.”
That speed compounds quickly across projects. “If you have a process with four weeks and you turn it into a few moments and you compound that over an entire project, you’re taking things that took years and you’re doing them in weeks,” he explained.
The industry mindset is changing
Another major takeaway from DevCon was the noticeable shift in how people are approaching AI adoption.
Last year, many companies were still hesitant. Teams questioned whether now was the right time to invest or experiment. This year felt different.
“I’m seeing very, very clearly here that yes, the time is now,” Ben remarks. “We don’t have all the answers, and we’re seeing that exposure, that lean in, that experimentation.”
That willingness to experiment may become one of the biggest differentiators over the next few years. The companies leaning in today are actively figuring out how these tools fit into real workflows, rather than waiting for the technology to feel perfect.
Navigating challenges around change
Innovation introduces major changes, and with any change comes uncertainty or anxiety. This is something that Ben readily acknowledges.
“Change is hard, and the pace of this change is happening very, very fast. “It’s right that it induces some feeling of anxiety or concern because of the pace.”
Part of the challenge is that nobody has all the answers yet. The technology is evolving quickly, and many companies are still figuring out how AI changes workflows, decisions, and even the order of operations across projects.
Ben believes the answer is to “lean into that and to explore and to experiment and also to have the ability to make mistakes in the change itself.”
That mindset showed up throughout DevCon. Attendees weren’t just sharing success stories. They were sharing lessons learned, failed experiments, and the process changes they’re actively navigating together.
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